The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce | Page 9

the gate and passes up the wide
white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh
and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the
bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an
attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He
springs forward with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels
a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light
blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon--then all is
darkness and silence!
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently
from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

CHICKAMAUGA
One sunny autumn afternoon a child strayed away from its rude home
in a small field and entered a forest unobserved. It was happy in a new
sense of freedom from control, happy in the opportunity of exploration
and adventure; for this child's spirit, in bodies of its ancestors, had for
thousands of years been trained to memorable feats of discovery and
conquest--victories in battles whose critical moments were centuries,
whose victors' camps were cities of hewn stone. From the cradle of its
race it had conquered its way through two continents and passing a
great sea had penetrated a third, there to be born to war and dominion
as a heritage.
The child was a boy aged about six years, the son of a poor planter. In
his younger manhood the father had been a soldier, had fought against
naked savages and followed the flag of his country into the capital of a
civilized race to the far South. In the peaceful life of a planter the
warrior-fire survived; once kindled, it is never extinguished. The man
loved military books and pictures and the boy had understood enough
to make himself a wooden sword, though even the eye of his father

would hardly have known it for what it was. This weapon he now bore
bravely, as became the son of an heroic race, and pausing now and
again in the sunny space of the forest assumed, with some exaggeration,
the postures of aggression and defense that he had been taught by the
engraver's art. Made reckless by the ease with which he overcame
invisible foes attempting to stay his advance, he committed the
common enough military error of pushing the pursuit to a dangerous
extreme, until he found himself upon the margin of a wide but shallow
brook, whose rapid waters barred his direct advance against the flying
foe that had crossed with illogical ease. But the intrepid victor was not
to be baffled; the spirit of the race which had passed the great sea
burned unconquerable in that small breast and would not be denied.
Finding a place where some bowlders in the bed of the stream lay but a
step or a leap apart, he made his way across and fell again upon the
rear-guard of his imaginary foe, putting all to the sword.
Now that the battle had been won, prudence required that he withdraw
to his base of operations. Alas; like many a mightier conqueror, and
like one, the mightiest, he could not
curb the lust for war, Nor learn that tempted Fate will leave the loftiest
star.
Advancing from the bank of the creek he suddenly found himself
confronted with a new and more formidable enemy: in the path that he
was following, sat, bolt upright, with ears erect and paws suspended
before it, a rabbit! With a startled cry the child turned and fled, he knew
not in what direction, calling with inarticulate cries for his mother,
weeping, stumbling, his tender skin cruelly torn by brambles, his little
heart beating hard with terror--breathless, blind with tears--lost in the
forest! Then, for more than an hour, he wandered with erring feet
through the tangled undergrowth, till at last, overcome by fatigue, he
lay down in a narrow space between two rocks, within a few yards of
the stream and still grasping his toy sword, no longer a weapon but a
companion, sobbed himself to sleep. The wood birds sang merrily
above his head; the squirrels, whisking their bravery of tail, ran barking
from tree to tree, unconscious of the pity of it, and somewhere far away
was a strange, muffled thunder, as if the partridges were drumming in
celebration of nature's victory over the son of her immemorial enslavers.
And back at the little plantation, where white men and black were

hastily searching the fields and hedges in alarm, a mother's heart was
breaking for her missing child.
Hours passed, and then the little sleeper rose to his feet. The chill of the
evening