“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 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 tow.”

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.

III

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 fulness—­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 plash; 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