tion>Ambrose Bierce
TALES OF SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
(26 Stories in One eBook)
Including Chickamauga, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Mocking-Bird and more
Published by
Books
- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2017 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-1848-6
Table of Contents
Soldiers
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Preface to the First Edition
Denied existence by the chief publishing houses of the country, this book owes itself to Mr. E.L.G. Steele, merchant, of this city. In attesting Mr. Steele’s faith in his judgment and his friend, it will serve its author’s main and best ambition.
A.B.
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 4, 1891.
Soldiers
A Horseman in the Sky
I
One sunny afternoon in the autumn of the year 1861 a soldier lay in a clump of laurel by the side of a road in western Virginia. He lay at full length upon his stomach, his feet resting upon the toes, his head upon the left forearm. His extended right hand loosely grasped his rifle. But for the somewhat methodical disposition of his limbs and a slight rhythmic movement of the cartridge-box at the back of his belt he might have been thought to be dead. He was asleep at his post of duty. But if detected he would be dead shortly afterward, death being the just and legal penalty of his crime.
The clump of laurel in which the criminal lay was in the angle of a road which after ascending southward a steep acclivity to that point turned sharply to the west, running along the summit for perhaps one hundred yards. There it turned southward again and went zigzagging downward through the forest. At the salient of that second angle was a large flat rock, jutting out northward, overlooking the deep valley from which the road ascended. The rock capped a high cliff; a stone dropped from its outer edge would have fallen sheer downward one thousand feet to the tops of the pines. The angle where the soldier lay was on another spur of the same
