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 fiber 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 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