Ambrose Bierce
AMBROSE BIERCE
_______________
THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY,
TALES, & MEMOIRS
_______________
S. T. Joshi, editor
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
Volume compilation, notes, and chronology copyright © 2011 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.
All rights reserved.
No part of the book may be reproduced commercially by offset-lithographic or equivalent copying devices without the permission of the publisher.
Some of the material in this volume is reprinted by permission of the holders of copyright and publication rights. See Note on the Texts on page 851 for acknowledgments.
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA, a nonprofit publisher, is dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America's best and most significant writing. Each year the Library adds new volumes to its collection of essential works by America's foremost novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and statesmen.
If you would like to request a free catalog and find out more about The Library of America, please visit www.loa.org/catalog or send us an e-mail at [email protected] with your name and address. Include your e-mail address if you would like to receive our occasional newsletter with items of interest to readers of classic American literature and exclusive interviews with Library of America authors and editors (we will never share your e-mail address).
Print ISBN: 978-1-59853-102-2
eISBN 978-1-59853-183-1
First eBook Edition: April 2012
Contents
IN THE MIDST OF LIFE (TALES OF SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS)
Soldiers
A Horseman in the Sky
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Chickamauga
A Son of the Gods
One of the Missing
Killed at Resaca
The Affair at Coulter’s Notch
The Coup de Grâce
Parker Adderson, Philosopher
An Affair of Outposts
The Story of a Conscience
One Kind of Officer
One Officer, One Man
George Thurston
The Mocking-Bird
Civilians
The Man Out of the Nose
An Adventure at Brownville
The Famous Gilson Bequest
The Applicant
A Watcher by the Dead
The Man and the Snake
A Holy Terror
The Suitable Surroundings
The Boarded Window
A Lady from Redhorse
The Eyes of the Panther
CAN SUCH THINGS BE?
Can Such Things Be?
The Death of Halpin Frayser
The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch
One Summer Night
The Moonlit Road
A Diagnosis of Death
Moxon’s Master
A Tough Tussle
One of Twins
The Haunted Valley
A Jug of Sirup
Staley Fleming’s Hallucination
A Resumed Identity
A Baby Tramp
The Night-Doings at “Deadman’s”
Beyond the Wall
A Psychological Shipwreck
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot
John Mortonson’s Funeral
The Realm of the Unreal
John Bartine’s Watch
The Damned Thing
Haïta the Shepherd
An Inhabitant of Carcosa
The Stranger
The Ways of Ghosts
Present at a Hanging
A Cold Greeting
A Wireless Message
An Arrest
Soldier-Folk
A Man with Two Lives
Three and One Are One
A Baffled Ambuscade
Two Military Executions
Some Haunted Houses
The Isle of Pines
A Fruitless Assignment
A Vine on a House
At Old Man Eckert’s
The Spook House
The Other Lodgers
The Thing at Nolan
“Mysterious Disappearances”
The Difficulty of Crossing a Field
An Unfinished Race
Charles Ashmore’s Trail
THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY
BITS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
On a Mountain
What I Saw of Shiloh
A Little of Chickamauga
The Crime at Pickett’s Mill
Four Days in Dixie
What Occurred at Franklin
’Way Down in Alabam’
Working for an Empress
Across the Plains
The Mirage
A Sole Survivor
SELECTED STORIES
Mrs. Dennison’s Head
The Man Overboard
Jupiter Doke, Brigadier-General
A Bottomless Grave
For the Ahkoond
My Favorite Murder
Oil of Dog
Ashes of the Beacon
Chronology
Note on the Texts
Notes
IN THE MIDST OF LIFE
(TALES OF SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS)
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 cliff. Had he been awake he would have commanded a view, not only of the short arm of the road and the jutting rock, but of the entire profile of the cliff below it. It might well have made him giddy to look.
The country was wooded everywhere except at the bottom of the valley to the northward, where there was a small natural meadow, through which flowed a stream scarcely visible from the valley’s rim. This open ground looked hardly larger than an ordinary dooryard, but was really several acres in extent. Its green was more vivid than that of the inclosing forest. Away beyond it rose a line of giant cliffs similar to those upon which we are supposed to stand in our survey of the savage scene, and through which the road had somehow made its climb to the summit. The configuration of the valley, indeed, was such that from this point of observation it seemed entirely shut in, and one could but have wondered how the road which found a way out of it had found a way into it, and whence came and whither went the waters of the stream that parted the meadow more than a thousand feet below.
No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theatre of war; concealed in the forest at the bottom of that military rat-trap, in which half a hundred men in possession of the exits might have starved an army to submission, lay five regiments of Federal infantry. They had marched all the previous day and night, and were resting. At nightfall they would take to the road again, climb to the place where their unfaithful sentinel now slept, and descending the other slope of the ridge fall upon a camp of the enemy at about midnight. Their hope was to surprise it, for the road led to the rear of it. In case of failure, their position would be perilous in the extreme; and fail they surely would should accident or vigilance apprise the enemy of the movement.
II
The sleeping sentinel in the clump of laurel was a young Virginian named Carter Druse. He was the son of wealthy parents, an only child, and had known such ease and cultivation and high living as wealth and taste were able to command in the mountain country of western Virginia. His home was but a few miles from where he now lay. One morning he had risen from the breakfast-table and said, quietly but gravely: “Father, a Union regiment has arrived at Grafton. I am going to join it.”
The father lifted his leonine head, looked at the son a moment in silence, and replied: “Well, go, sir, and whatever may occur, do what you conceive to be your duty.
1 comment