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    Terror by Night: Classic Ghost & Horror Stories
    Terror by Night: Classic Ghost & Horror Stories
    Terror by Night: Classic Ghost & Horror Stories
    Ebook418 pages8 hours

    Terror by Night: Classic Ghost & Horror Stories

    By Ambrose Bierce

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    'Nothing is so improbable as what is true'

    Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life, which he channelled into his fiction. And in his death, or rather his disappearance, he created a mystery as strange and unresolved as any that he penned himself. But more of that later.

    Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in a log cabin on 21st June 1842, in Horse Creek, Meigs County, Ohio, USA. He was the tenth of thirteen children, ten of whom survived infancy. His father, an unsuccessful farmer with an unseemly love of literature, had given all the Bierce children names beginning with 'A'. There was Abigail, the eldest; then Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius etc. So oddness was a part of Bierce's life from the beginning. Poverty and religion of the extreme variety were the two chief influences on young Ambrose's childhood. He not only hated this period of his life, he also developed a deep hatred for his family and this is reflected in some of his stories which depict families preying on and murdering one another. For example the unforgettable opening sentence of 'An Imperfect Conflagration' seems to sum up his bitter attitude: 'Early in 1872 I murdered my father - an act that made a deep impression on me at the time'.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateNov 1, 2011
    ISBN9781848705159
    Terror by Night: Classic Ghost & Horror Stories
    Author

    Ambrose Bierce

    Ambrose Bierce was an American writer, critic and war veteran. Bierce fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War, eventually rising to the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army following an 1866 expedition across the Great Plains. Bierce’s harrowing experiences during the Civil War, particularly those at the Battle of Shiloh, shaped a writing career that included editorials, novels, short stories and poetry. Among his most famous works are “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Boarded Window,” “Chickamauga,” and What I Saw of Shiloh. While on a tour of Civil-War battlefields in 1913, Bierce is believed to have joined Pancho Villa’s army before disappearing in the chaos of the Mexican Revolution.

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      Book preview

      Terror by Night - Ambrose Bierce

      TERROR BY NIGHT

      Classic Ghost Stories

      Ambrose Bierce

      with an introduction by
      David Stuart Davies

      Terror by Night first published by

      Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2006

      Published as an ePublication 2011

      ISBN 978 1 84870 515 9

      Wordsworth Editions Limited

      8B East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ

      Wordsworth® is a registered trademark of

      Wordsworth Editions Limited

      All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

      Readers interested in other titles from Wordsworth Editions are invited to visit our website at

      www.wordsworth-editions.com

      For our latest list of printed books, and a full mail-order service contact

      Bibliophile Books, Unit 5 Datapoint,

      South Crescent, London E16 4TL

      Tel: +44 020 74 74 24 74

      Fax: +44 020 74 74 85 89

      orders@bibliophilebooks.com

      www.bibliophilebooks.com

      For my husband

      ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

      with love from your wife, the publisher

      Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,

      not just for me but for our children,

      Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler

      INTRODUCTION

      ‘Nothing is so improbable as what is true.’

      Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life which he channelled into his fiction. And in his death, or rather his disappearance, he created a mystery as strange and unresolved as any that he penned himself. But more of that later.

      Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in a log cabin on 21 June 1842, in Horse Creek, Meigs County, Ohio, USA. He was the tenth of thirteen children, ten of whom survived infancy. His father, an unsuccessful farmer with an unseemly love of literature, had a given all the Bierce children first names beginning with A. There was Abigail, the eldest; then Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, etc. So oddness was a part of Bierce’s life from the beginning.

      Poverty and religion of the extreme variety were the two chief influences on young Ambrose’s childhood. He not only hated this period of his life, he also developed a deep hatred for his family and this is reflected in some of his stories which depict families preying on and murdering one another. For example, the unforgettable opening sentence of ‘An Imperfect Conflagration’ seems to sum up his bitter attitude: ‘Early in 1872 I murdered my father – an act that made a deep impression on me at the time.’ These strong feelings against his family helped to develop his mordant wit and brutal irony – and, some would say, made him a difficult and unpleasant fellow to know.

      These aspects of his character were further amplified by his involvement in the American Civil War when brother did in fact kill brother and families were divided against themselves. Bierce served in the war on the Union side. The horrible accidents and cruel twists of fate that he encountered during the conflict stimulated his imagination into creating what was regarded as a new genre – the short story that begins as a war story but then subtly changes into a psychological tale of terror. The most famous of Bierce’s tales, ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek’, is a fine example. The story concerns a soldier caught by the enemy who is sentenced to be hanged. And then, miraculously, he believes that he has escaped the gallows. Bierce’s ability to play with the notion of time and the reader’s preconceptions is brilliantly handled in this narrative. At least three films have been made of the story. There was a silent version in the 1920s. A French version, called La Rivière du Hibou and directed by Robert Enrico, was made in black and white in 1962, faithfully recounting the original narrative using voice-over. A third version, directed by Brian James Egan, was released in 2005. The 1962 film was used for an episode of the television series ‘The Twilight Zone’. This story typifies most of Bierce’s other work in that it is bleak, with a cruel twist at the end. But that was how this writer saw life. He once observed, ‘Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.’ For such thoughts one critic gave him the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce’.

      He was a good soldier, achieving the rank of major for ‘his distinguished services’, and was given permission to resign his commission shortly before the Civil War ended. Having entered the conflict as a lowly farm lad, he was now a gentleman. He had escaped the shackles of his claustrophobic and impoverished upbringing. He landed in San Francisco in 1867, and there decided on a career in journalism. Self-taught, he eventually attained a regular job on the San Francisco News Letter. Very soon Ambrose Bierce became one of the city’s great literary figures, being numbered with the likes of Mark Twain and Bret Harte.

      In 1871, he courted and wed Mary Ellen (‘Mollie’) Day, a San Franciscan socialite from one of the best families of the city. The same year his first published story, ‘The Haunted Valley’, appeared. This strange and engrossing tale has none of the stylistic immaturities of a writer’s early work. It is assured and confident in tone and quite complex. This short story has many of the qualities and structural features found in most of Bierce’s work, including the rather shocking surprise ending which makes you want to read it again in order to reassure yourself that some important detail did not escape your notice. Certainly, the casual reader will miss many of the subtleties, clues if you like, which support and illuminate the dénouement. But Bierce is not for the casual reader.

      He remained in San Francisco for many years, eventually becoming famous as a contributor to, and/or editor of, a number of local news-papers and periodicals, including The San Francisco News Letter, the Argonaut, and the Wasp. He continued to write short stories as well as penning controversial columns full of wit and criticism, the most famous of which was called Prattle. He lived and wrote in England from 1872 to 1875. Returning to the United States, he took up residence in San Francisco once more.

      It was during this later period that he began work on his most famous book, The Devil’s Dictionary (originally called The Cynic’s Work Book), a collection of definitions editorially tinged with bitterness, scepticism, pessimism and social comment. Above all, they are very funny, demonstating there was a dark vein of humour present in the apparently gloomy and troubled persona of the author. Here are a few examples of entries in this notorious volume:

      Cat: a soft, indestructible automaton provided by Nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

      Idiot: member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.

      Justice: a commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

      Love: a temporary insanity curable by marriage.

      Patience: a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

      Philosophy: a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

      Religion: a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

      Vote: the instrument and symbol of a free man’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

      Zeal: a certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced.

      In 1887, Bierce became one of the first regular columnists and editorialists to be employed on William Randolph Hearst‘s newspaper the San Francisco Examiner, eventually becoming one of the most prominent and influential among the writers and journalists of the West Coast. In December 1899 he moved to Washington DC, but continued his association with the Hearst newspapers until 1906.

      At the turn of the century, Bierce’s personal life began to crumble. His son Leigh died of pneumonia related to alcoholism. In 1904, his wife Mollie filed for divorce on the grounds of ‘abandonment’, but she died before the proceedings were finalised. Bierce continued writing through this period, but became less and less involved in the world around him.

      Ironically, the greatest fame that Ambrose Bierce achieved was by simply vanishing from life. In 1912, after three years of fitful retirement from literary endeavours, he journeyed to Mexico with no apparent object in view. The last word that was ever heard from him came in a letter he posted in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1913: ‘If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it’s a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico – ah, that is euthanasia.’ He was never heard of again. His death has not been recorded and no body has ever been found. What really happened to Ambrose Bierce is still a mystery and is likely to remain so. In many ways it is fitting for a man who created so many dark and surprising scenarios in his fiction to end his life with a question mark – his own personal, autobiographical twist in the tail.

      Ambrose Bierce wrote ninety or so stories during his lifetime, but never turned his hand to writing a novel. In fact, he derided the novels of his time because he believed they were constructed in a manner that became predictable and slavish to the demands of probability. He defined the novel as ‘a short story padded’. His short stories were the polar opposite of such an approach. He was the master of improbability. Stating his philosphy on this matter, he wrote: ‘Nothing is so improbable as what is true. It is the unexpected that occurs; but that is not saying enough; it is also the unlikely – one might almost say the impossible.’ He certainly applied this theory to his own fiction. He believed that the short shory was a superior form of creative expression because it was limited only to truths of the psyche rather than being committed to the realistic creation of social events and interaction. He was more interested in the unexpected, the strange incidents of fate and accident: improbable truths – and, indeed, sometimes apparently impossible truths. But the reader who has read his words will always be prepared to believe in these truths.

      His stories invariably turn on these strange and often heart-stopping twists of fate – twists that are calculated to shock and shake the reader out of a comfortable complacency to revealuate the events in the story and indeed in reality itself.

      Bierce scholar Professor E. J. Hopkins divided the author’s output into three categories: the Tales of Horror, the World of War and the World of Tall Stories. However, many of the stories seem to fit more than one heading. ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek’ is a case in point. Because of its American Civil War background, Hopkins places this in the World of War section, but it remains one of Bierce’s most chilling and unnerving tales. Certainly for this collection we have scooped up all of the Tales of Horror but we have also dipped into the other two categories for suitable tales to add to our dark brew.

      It would be inappropriate and a rather a demanding task to talk about all the stories in this volume before you, the reader, are let loose on them. However, certain stories are worthy of comment if only to alert you to the kind of experiences which await you when you start to devour them.

      One of the most anthologised of Bierce’s tales is ‘The Eyes of the Panther’. The story is created like a jigsaw with four pieces that the reader needs to fit together in order to see the whole picture. However, this is not easy as incidents are presented to us wreathed in the diverting mist of words that Bierce typically uses to entice the reader, while at the same time not quite providing a clear view of events. The story, short though it is, is split into four parts, entitled in a bleakly humorous way: One Does Not Always Marry When Insane; A Room May Be Too Narrow for Three, Though One is Outside; The Theory of Defence; An Appeal to the Conscience of God. On reaching the chilling end, you are still not sure you have quite grasped the truth of the matter or, if you have, it is really too horrible to contemplate. This story exemplifies the format that Bierce returned to time and time again: the factual, objective style; the often puzzling delivery of the narrative; the touches of dark, some might say misplaced humour; and the final surprise twist. The story also demonstrates that Bierce is not an easy read. I hesitate to use the phrase ‘an acquired taste’, but we are certainly in that area. However, those who do not find a natural affinity with his prose but who persevere are richly rewarded.

      His classic ‘The Moonlit Road’ tells a ghost story from three perspectives, including that of the dead victim. It slowly unravels a tragedy which even when it is fully exposed is not really fully explained. And this element of uncertainty is what lifts this story to make it a great one. There is also, in the telling, a great sadness which perhaps reflects Bierce’s own miserable view of existence. In the story, the narrators – the son, the murderer, the dead woman – all convey a sense of despair with life. The story opens with a typically bitter, ironical observation from the son:

      ‘I am the most unfortunate of men. Rich, respected, fairly well educated and of sound health – with many other advantages usually valued by those having them and coveted by those who have them not – I sometimes think that I should be less unhappy if they had been denied me, for then the contrast between my outer and inner life would not be continually demanding a painful attention.’

      It is a case of you can’t win. Even with all the advantages he has, fate decrees that the son cannot enjoy them because his inner life has been damaged by events. While we may have some control over our outer life, Bierce observes, we have none over the inner life.

      One final example of Bierce’s work is ‘The Middle Toe of the Right Foot’. Again we are challenged to piece together a complex ghost story which is presented to us in three sections. Again comes the surprise ending and the strange sense that we are not being given all the information we need to create a full and comprehensive narrative. There remains, yet again, a shady corner which can only be illuminated by the reader’s individual imagination.

      Although Bierce’s stories are short – bite-sized, you might say – they are not quickly or easily digested. To continue the food analogy, they are like rich puddings, thick of texture and laced with some unkown intoxicant. Devour them slowly; savour them and digest at leisure. They are an indulgence well worth giving way to.

      DAVID STUART DAVIES

      TERROR BY NIGHT

      An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

      1

      A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the ties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners – two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as ‘support’, that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest – a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the centre of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.

      Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground – a gentle slope topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway up the slope between the bridge and fort were the spectators – a single company of infantry in line, at ‘parade rest’, the butts of their rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the centre of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.

      The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good – a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock coat. He wore a moustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark grey, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.

      The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgement as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his ‘unsteadfast footing’, then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!

      He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift – all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or nearby – it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each new stroke with impatience and – he knew not why – apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the trust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.

      He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. ‘If I could free my hands,’ he thought, ‘I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader’s farthest advance.’

      As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man’s brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.

      2

      Peyton Farquhar was a well-to-do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave-owner and like other slave-owners a politician, he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with that gallant army which had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in wartime. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.

      One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a grey-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs Farquhar was only too happy to serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and enquired eagerly for news from the front.

      ‘The Yanks are repairing the railroads,’ said the man, ‘and are getting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek bridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. The commandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels, or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order.’

      ‘How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?’ Farquhar asked.

      ‘About thirty miles.’

      ‘Is there no force on this side of the creek?’

      ‘Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge.’

      ‘Suppose a man – a civilian and student of hanging – should elude the picket post and perhaps get the better of the sentinel,’ said Farquhar, smiling, ‘what could he accomplish?’

      The soldier reflected. ‘I was there a month ago,’ he replied. ‘I observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It is now dry and would burn like tinder.’

      The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal scout.

      3

      As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened – ages later, it seemed to him – by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fibre of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well-defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fullness – of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river! – the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising toward the surface – knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable. ‘To be hanged and drowned,’ he thought, ‘that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No, I will not be shot; that is not fair.’

      He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that he was trying to free his hands. He gave the struggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feat of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort! What magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavour! Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, the hands dimly seen on each side in the growing light. He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its undulations resembling those of a water snake. ‘Put it back, put it back!’ He thought he shouted these words to his hands, for the undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst pang that he had yet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire, his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downward strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!

      He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf – he saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colours in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragonflies’ wings, the strokes of the water-spiders’ legs, like oars which had lifted their boat – all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.

      He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment the visible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated, pointing at him. The captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire; the others were unarmed. Their movements were grotesque and horrible, their forms gigantic.

      Suddenly he heard a sharp report and something struck the water smartly within a few inches of his head, spattering his face with spray. He heard a second report, and saw one of the sentinels with his rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising from the muzzle. The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a grey eye and remembered having read that grey eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed.

      A counter-swirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he was again looking at the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears. Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dread significance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant; the lieutenant on shore was taking a part in the morning’s work. How coldly and pitilessly – with what an even, calm intonation, presaging and enforcing tranquillity in the men – with what accurately measured interval fell those cruel words: ‘Company! . . . Attention! . . . Shoulder arms! . . . Ready!. . . Aim! . . . Fire!’

      Farquhar dived – dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in his ears like the voice of Niagara, yet he heard the dull thunder of the volley and, rising again toward the surface, met shining bits of metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some of them touched him on the face and hands, then fell away, continuing their descent. One lodged between his collar and neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.

      As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a long time under water; he was perceptibly farther downstream – nearer to safety. The soldiers had almost finished reloading; the metal ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were drawn from the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. The two sentinels fired again, independently and ineffectually.

      The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was now swimming vigorously with the current. His brain was as energetic as his arms and legs; he thought with the rapidity of lightning.

      ‘The officer,’ he reasoned, ‘will not make that martinet’s error a second time. It is as easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. He has probably already given the command to fire at will. God help me, I cannot dodge them all!’

      An appalling splash within two yards of him was followed by a loud, rushing sound, diminuendo, which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river to its deeps! A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken a hand in the game. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, and in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond.

      ‘They will not do that again,’ he thought; ‘the next time they will use a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smoke will apprise me – the report arrives too late; it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun.’

      Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round – spinning like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men, all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented by their colours only; circular horizontal streaks of colour – that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In few moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream – the southern bank – and behind a projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest of his motion, the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A strange roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of Aeolian harps. He had no wish to perfect his escape – he was content to remain in that enchanting spot until retaken.

      A whiz and a rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above his head roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a random farewell. He sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the forest.

      All that day he travelled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman’s road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.

      By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famished. The thought of his wife and children

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