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 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 near by--
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.

II

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, w