Tales of Soldiers and Civilians: reference groups

A Union soldier lies asleep at his post in a clump of laurel on a cliff-top above a valley, a crime for which the lawful penalty is death.

Five regiments lie hidden in the valley below, meaning to climb past the sleeping sentinel at nightfall and surprise the enemy camp; if they are seen, they are trapped.

He left home, proved himself brave and was picked for this dangerous outpost, but fatigue beat him; now something wakes him and he grips his rifle.

In the darkness he walked round his tree and lost his bearings, not knowing where the enemy or his own camp lay; then he heard a figure approaching and challenged it.

Stupefied by grief, he finishes laying her out and sits by the body with his head on the table; a wailing cry like a lost child sounds from the woods, and he falls asleep.

He does not return by nightfall; she bars the door, puts a candle in the open window for him and falls asleep, dreaming of a second child with the face of a wild animal, and wakes trembling.

He aims at the horseman's breast, but the rider turns and seems to look into his eyes; the young soldier shakes, turns faint and drops his face to the leaves.

Recovering, he tells himself the rider may have seen nothing and may ride away, then sees an escort watering horses in plain view in the meadow below; the secret is out.

Recalling his father's parting words about duty, he aims at the horse instead and fires calmly; below, an officer looks up and sees a horseman riding down through the air.

The officer, knowing better than to tell an incredible truth, says nothing of it; the sentinel tells a sergeant he shot a horse off the rock, and that the rider was his father.

The young captain rides up and is told to bring up a gun and engage the twelve; after a silence, he asks with effort whether the enemy guns are near the house.

Pale and hoarse, he asks whether the order is imperative; the general rides off without a sign, the mortified colonel nearly arrests him, and then the captain brings up a gun and opens fire.

The captain holds an isolated, dangerous command and issues passes to loyal locals, with an order that anyone abusing one will be shot; he has recognised the civilian as someone he knows.

The bugle sounds; the captain confesses that shame kept him from telling the story that might have won the prisoner a pardon, then orders him shot, unbound and unguarded.

The spy is shot by the firing squad; at the same moment the captain shoots himself, leaving instructions to be buried like the spy, without honours.

Among dead horses and men in the notch, the colonel points out there is room for one gun against twelve; the general ironically says the captain is a battery in himself, and the angry colonel cannot retort.

A hopeless duel of one gun against twelve begins; the gunners concentrate on the gun in front of the house, shells break into its roof, and the colonel remarks on the captain's reluctance to obey.

A general tells a battery captain he is not permitted to know anything and must simply open fire on any movement in his front; the captain has his lieutenant witness the order, and salutes with pointed formality as the general rides off into the fog.

He asks who heard the approach, pales slightly, and orders all guns to open fire with grape; meanwhile the general who gave the order tells the division commander the battery is badly commanded.

The lieutenant urgently protests that they must stop firing; the captain coldly repeats the general's words to him, then shoots dead a man who mounts the parapet waving a flag, and the rest flee.

The division commander rides in, looks over the parapet and furiously tells the captain he has been fighting their own men; the captain says he knew it, and that the reason was withheld in his orders.

The new aide asks to come along on a hazardous survey; the narrator gruffly asks in what capacity, and the aide says as a spectator, handing his sword and pistols to his servant. The narrator regrets his rudeness.

Under fire, the aide sits in the open road with folded arms; his horse is killed, and he stands unarmed before a charging trooper until a lucky bullet drops his attacker. The narrator later apologises.

A general, half-mocking, asks a colonel whether his much-praised young artillery captain would like to put a gun in a narrow notch facing twelve enemy guns; the colonel defends his man, and the general says it is the only place.

The colonel asks that the captain's hesitation be kept quiet; he refuses the infantry permission to silence the guns, as the general forbade it, and an adjutant begins to hint that the captain is a Southerner.

The adjutant reveals that the general once camped near the captain's home, there was trouble over the captain's wife and a complaint, and the general was transferred; the indignant colonel goes to withdraw the gun himself.

That morning the major ordered the captain's company to a deadly position, insultingly suggesting he hand over command; the captain retorted that the major would be better dead, and in the action the sergeant fell.

He draws his sword and drives it through his friend's heart; the dying man grips the blade, and at that moment the friend's brother steps out of the trees with two stretcher-bearers.

The resentful lieutenant says only that he warned the captain and was insulted, and denies knowing of any orders; the captain hears his doom and hands over his sword.

The rider tells him the bridge is lightly guarded and that dry driftwood lodged against it would burn; the planter is tempted, and the rider turns out to be an enemy scout.

A shabby but striking civilian, coming from the direction of the camp, is halted by a sentinel for his pass while the captain commanding the post looks on.

The civilian calmly turns and faces the captain's cocked pistol, offering his pass; the captain says it is forged and names him.

A young heiress writes to her married friend that she is fascinated by a handsome, brilliant, much-travelled man at her seaside resort.

She defends him against her friend's teasing; a gossiping old acquaintance hints he has mysterious connections and is thought a magician, which thrills her and explains his power over her.

The sentinel, only son of a wealthy Virginian family, had told his father he was joining the Union; the father called him a traitor, told him to do his duty, and asked him not to disturb his dying mother.

A man of Southern sympathies asks the Governor for a commission in the Union army, saying he acts on what he thinks is right, not on what he feels; the Governor, preferring a man with his heart in it, is inclined to refuse.

He dreams of a happy childhood by a great river with his beloved twin brother, their widowed mother and a mocking-bird whose song filled everything.

In the dream their mother dies, the brothers are parted to feuding relatives on opposite sides of the river, the bird goes with the brother, and their letters stop; he wakes at sunset.

An advancing army halts at the edge of a wood before open country and a stone wall on a distant crest; after days of fighting the enemy has vanished, and nobody knows whether they wait behind the wall.

The young officer asks the commander something the older man is reluctant to grant, then rides alone at a walk straight toward the wall; the skirmishers are halted, and the watching army is stirred to adoration and shame for having laughed.

The narrator explains that skirmishers sent to find out whether the enemy holds the ridge would be slaughtered; the young officer is paying the price alone.

He could surrender and live, but that would answer nothing; for his errand to succeed he must either return unharmed or be shot dead before his comrades' eyes.

Having seen the enemy line, he gallops back and forth along the crest trying to force the hidden troops to reveal themselves by firing on him, while they hold their fire.

A fearless private detailed as a scout slips out past the earthworks, sent by his general to creep as close to the enemy lines as possible and learn all he can.

He passes the picket line, where a man remarks that the enemy will soon have his rifle, and creeps forward through the thicket, steady and alert.

He sees an enemy rifle-pit, watches it, reads the signs correctly and stands up: the enemy has gone.

To be certain, he pushes on to a derelict plantation and hides in a tumbledown shed on posts, from which he sees the enemy's rear-guard climbing a mountain road.

His duty is to hurry back and report, but the retreating column tempts him, and he cocks and sets his rifle to fire into it.

Granted a pass as a reward for his supposed bravery, he goes back to search for the person he believes he shot, penetrates deep into enemy country, and finally sits down, disappointed.

His horse is killed; he stands and salutes with his sabre before he falls, and his comrades, choking with emotion, surge forward against orders into the enemy's fire.

The commander, unmoved, sounds the halt; the lines fall back carrying their wounded and the dead, and the narrator laments the many needless deaths and the hero's vain devotion.

Sent with a message the long, safe way round, he instead canters into the open field under the enemy's guns; the general shouts to stop him, and the private who tries is killed at once.

He rides calmly along the enemy's front; both lines break into a furious battle around him, and he ends up standing alone in the shot-swept space, his horse dead.

The captain's remnant retreats past him; as the enemy converges on the Governor, the captain sees him and orders his few men forward to save the Governor of their State.

The captain, arm broken, kills attackers with sword and revolver in a savage hand-to-hand fight over the prostrate Governor, until only a handful of his men remain.

Reinforcements arrive; the enemy tramples the last defenders and flees. The Governor wakes unhurt but for his ankle, while a general praises the beautiful fight over rows of dead and wounded.

The staff grow fond of him but are dismayed that he is vain of his courage: in every battle he refuses to take cover, standing exposed where braver, older men sensibly hide.

Sent with orders across fire-swept ground, he walks upright instead of running, holding every eye; a fellow officer offers to bet he will be killed before he reaches the ditch.

Blocked by a gully he could have sheltered in, he will neither advance nor retreat and stands waiting to be killed; both sides stop firing, the enemy honours his body, and a year later the narrator finds a woman's love letter in his pocketbook.

In a later assault the aide is lost and found badly wounded; a captured enemy soldier says he walked straight into their line and, with rifles at his chest, folded his arms and refused to surrender.

Warned that snakes sometimes escape, the guest thinks of ringing for a servant, but does not, lest he be suspected of fear; he cannot tell whether the snake is dangerous.

He resolves to back quietly out of the room, but as he lifts his foot he feels an aversion to retreating, asking himself whether bravery is only pride and whether he will retreat because no one is watching.

He is exultant, eager to prove himself to his men and to a woman at home; then the first enemy shell shrieks toward the line and he dodges and throws up his hands.

The sergeant behind him sees a bloody blade spring from his back; he has fallen on his sword and dies. A week later the official report lists the losses as one officer, one man.

At the mess, a stammering quartermaster suggests the aide's folded arms are his way of mastering an urge to run; the narrator angrily defends him. Later the aide learns a giant camp swing and swings higher than anyone dares.

The host says anyone locked alone all night in the dark with a corpse would crack; the student says he knows a fearless stranger who would take that on for any stake.

The host accepts the wager, and the third doctor offers to play the corpse. In the dark room, the watcher cannot sleep and tells himself he stays in his chair out of respect for the dead.

The friend, suspecting the writer takes opium, teases him by asking whether the story could really frighten him; the writer says he would not dare to read it alone in a deserted house, and that he has a manuscript that would kill him.

Stung, the friend accepts the dare to read the manuscript alone at night in the deserted house. The next day three men and the boy go there, mocking his story, and find a dead body.

He remembers he left it cocked with a hair trigger; he feels uneasy but not afraid, recalls facing guns before, and looks away.

He decides to wait to be found, but a pain grows in his forehead whenever he closes his eyes; he drifts into childhood memories, and when he cries out he hears fear in his own voice and denies it.

The pain seems to bore through his head; memory, home and glory are erased, and the strong, brave man trembles and screams with terror.

He sees his lieutenant and his men laughing at him and burns with shame; his idea of war collapses, he trembles and chokes, and fears that what he feels is fear.

Staring at the silent wood, imagining the hidden guns, he analyses his feelings instead of fighting and groans aloud in despair at what he finds.

He hears a faint sound from the table and holds his breath until he nearly faints; angry, he gropes round the room in the dark and knocks over the stand.

The absurd discovery overwhelms him with terror; he cannot breathe or move.

He sees the muzzle of his own rifle protruding from the wreckage, aimed at the exact centre of his forehead.

He cannot look away from the muzzle, beats his hand bloody in delirium, resolves at least to die game, and curses rats that climb near the trigger.

The guardian calls her raving and fixes her with his gaze until she falls silent and clings to him weeping; an inquest finds heart disease, and neither of them goes to the funeral.

The guardian fixes her with his gaze; smiling but terrified, she leaps from the cliff. He coldly says it was her own act, the narrator calls him her murderer, and he walks away singing.

Declaring he is not so great a coward as to fear seeming afraid to himself, he tries to step back but steps forward instead, again and again, dragging the chair, as the snake's eyes blaze and he hears strange music.

He sees visions, including a crowned serpent with his dead mother's eyes, then falls on his face; the fall breaks the spell, but the thought of the unseen snake is so horrible that he looks again, and is held once more.

She checks her baby and holds it close, then sees two glowing eyes at the level of her own: a panther at the window.

The panther stands at the window watching; paralysed, she sinks to the floor shielding the baby with her body and waits through endless moments for it to spring.

A man enters, the door is locked behind him, he finds the windows barred, and he calmly sits down with a book.

The young man, resolute-looking, reads composedly for half an hour, glancing occasionally at the body, then moves the stand aside and returns to his chair.

He relights the candle, finds nothing changed, checks and bolts the door, sees that only half an hour has passed, and blows the candle out again.

He berates himself as a sceptic who will not lose his bet and self-respect to savage superstition, and then hears soft footsteps approaching behind him. At dawn the host and the student drive toward the house.

Digging feverishly into the night, he stands the coffin on end in the grave and is terrified by his own shadow falling on it, then tries to master his fear by moving his head.

He imagines the rotted corpse behind the lid and, for the first time that day, thinks of his fiancée's photograph, contrasting her beauty with the dead face.

He links the disfigured photograph with the dead woman's nickname, which spoke of a disfigurement, and becomes convinced the woman in the coffin is his fiancée.

The coffin seems to advance; he strikes the plate with his knife hilt, the rotten lid falls away, and he is face to face with the dead woman, shrieking.

He wakes in total darkness and hears soft bare footsteps; paralysed with terror, he cannot speak her name. Something crashes against the table and falls, there is a struggle, and when he reaches across, the body is gone.

The skirmishers pass the ruin; the brother glances at a dust-grey body in the timbers, takes it for an enemy dead a week, and moves on, checking his watch: twenty-two minutes have passed.

The gunners work idly, firing blind, until a great cheer bursts out of the fog close in front, and they work feverishly.

Grey figures swarm up the slope into grape and canister and fall in heaps; in dense smoke a few reach the parapet and are bayoneted back into the ditch.

He fired; the whole jumpy picket line fired and ran, but he, not knowing which way to run, stayed put and was praised for bravery. Sure he hit someone but finding no body, he kept quiet.

Walking back, he hears a mocking-bird and weeps, then finds in a thicket the body of his twin brother in enemy uniform, shot the night before; he never answers roll-call again.

One night he wakes to gleaming eyes at his open window; terrified but resolute, he raises his revolver and fires.

He hears a scream, follows a blood trail into the woods, and finds that he has killed not a panther but the woman he loved; her father mourns at her grave for years.

A man with bound hands and a noose round his neck stands on planks laid across a railroad bridge, attended by two soldiers and a sergeant, while a captain watches and sentinels close both ends.

The condemned man is a well-dressed civilian planter of about thirty-five with a kindly face, plainly no common criminal.

The plank he stands on is now held only by the sergeant's weight; unblindfolded, he stares at the water and watches a piece of driftwood that seems to move very slowly.

A captured spy in enemy uniform is questioned by a general in his tent; he jests about his coming execution at dawn and admits why he came.

The general says he has written the order for the prisoner's execution and offers a chaplain; the prisoner keeps joking and argues that death is nothing to fear.

The prisoner scoffs at fear of death as superstition; the general, uneasy, says he would not like to die tonight, then orders the provost-marshal to take the man out and shoot him at once. The prisoner cries out.

The prisoner begs frantically, insisting he is entitled to be hanged in the morning under military law; the general coldly repeats the order.

The man admits he is an enemy spy carrying plans of the fort, offers to submit without resistance if spared the indignity of being marched in at gunpoint, and is refused a handshake but trusted unguarded.

Trying to think of his wife and children, he is tormented by the loud ticking of his watch; he imagines freeing his hands, diving and escaping home, and the captain nods to the sergeant.

Coming round, he hears a voice saying he is caught like a rat in a trap, and calmly opens his eyes to reconnoitre and plan his defence.

He finds himself pinned by beams across his chest, legs and head, with only his right arm partly free; he is unhurt.

He tries every way to get his free hand onto the beam across his chest and cannot, and gives up that attempt.

The prisoner surveys the bare tent, noting a sabre, pistol and bowie-knife hanging on the pole; the general sends the guard off with a note.

Being led out, the prisoner seizes the bowie-knife and leaps on the general; the tent collapses on the struggling men, a sentinel fires, and the camp turns out.

He works a loose strip of board free and inches it toward the rifle, hoping to push the muzzle aside or deflect the bullet; the effort steadies him, though he is still terrified.

The board jams short; terror returns, then he grows calm and deliberately pushes it against the trigger. The rifle was already empty, but the shock kills him.

Even the weapons sound feeble; the futile day ends, and a night of discomfort gives way to a morning of apprehension.

In thick fog the army senses its lines are badly placed; men and officers talk anxiously, commanders look for their neighbours, and troops dig in of their own accord.

A captain stands at the head of his company in a vast line of battle awaiting attack; the narrator contrasts the silent order of the front with the endless confusion of the rear.

Before him lies a peaceful, empty landscape of fields and woods, yet every man in the line knows he is face to face with death.

The line is called to attention and waits for an order to advance that does not come; the delay is unbearable, until he looks at his sword, thinks of it as a Roman blade, and grows suddenly calm.

The handsome man looks him full in the face and he feels hatred and dread; the landlady says the man is the sisters' guardian, their late father's friend, devoted to them and able to pay.

A guest reading the passage scoffs at it, then notices two points of light under his bed that grow brighter and nearer; they are the eyes of a large coiled snake staring at him.

He writhes and froths on the floor, inching ever closer to the snake; downstairs, the scientist tells his wife about a new snake-eating snake and scoffs at the superstition of snakes' fascination.

A frontier woodsman lives devotedly with his young wife and baby in the wilderness; one morning, as he takes his rifle to hunt, she begs him to stay because of a terrible dream.

He laughs off her dream kindly, kisses her and the baby, and goes, closing the door on his happiness forever.

The suitor recalls local tales of a panther looking in at windows at night, and theorises that the rumour fed her morbid imagination.

The officer watches horse and rider fall, collapses with terror, then searches for the body in the wrong place and returns to camp.

He reflects that he is in a false position, praised for acts he did not perform, and that telling the truth would sound like a lie; he wishes he could find his man, and falls asleep.

He half doubts he saw anything; at breakfast two sisters appear, and he recognises the elder's voice as the woman's in the wood.

The men admit the boy was right; one reads the manuscript found by the body, which begins as a suicide note.

She tells him she is insane, or possessed, and asks him to hear her story; he is disbelieving but deeply disturbed.

Seeing the bloodstain, she throws the letter into the fire, saying she cannot bear blood, and asks how he died; the narrator, seeing her beauty and her heartlessness, answers that he was bitten by a snake.

Alone, the Governor calls it a bad business, opens a book at a sentence about men foolish enough to believe an unfaithful wife's lies, and throws the book into the fire.

The host admits he regrets the wager, which pride pushed him into; the fake corpse is their friend, and as they reach the house a man runs past looking for a doctor.

A crowd is gathering at the house; the student wants to flee and lie low, but the doctor says a physician may be needed and goes in.

The police clear the room; the student says the watcher has killed their friend, and the two agree to leave for Europe that afternoon.

A postscript tells the reader the writer will come for him after midnight; a relative of the dead friend burns the paper; a newspaper reports the writer has been committed to an asylum after being found sharpening a razor.

The letter reveals that a rival had told the woman her lover was seen cowering behind a tree, and that she could bear his death but not his cowardice; the narrator visits her to return it, and she is charming and careless.

The captain refers him to the general who gave the order, but that general is dead; the division commander, sympathetic, begs him for anything that might excuse him, and the captain calls on his lieutenant.

The captain spent two years of the war in a desk post he hated, refusing promotion out of principle; now at last at the front, he commands veterans who think him a shirker, and is too proud to explain.

A mining camp is united in condemning a man charged that morning with horse stealing; the rope and the coffin are being prepared before his trial is held.

The camp's leading citizen loudly insists the man is the thief and threatens anyone who disagrees; the saloon-keeper, to keep the citizen's custom, bars the suspect from his gaming table.

The camp decides he must hang; the thefts stop, but he drifts into highway robbery and horse theft, and is caught by his accuser leading away a neighbour's mare at night.

In a flashback, the planter, an ardent secessionist kept out of the army, longs for distinction; a grey-clad rider tells him that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad will be hanged.

He is tried and hanged, leaving his whole estate to his captor on condition of a decent burial; a codicil is found in his pocket after death.

The codicil gives the estate to anyone who proves in court within five years that he robbed the sluice boxes, otherwise to the executor; the executor laughs and accepts the trust.

The estate proves enormous; claimants flood in with evidence, and the executor raises a grand monument praising the dead man's honesty and victimhood.

An old drinking friend, now a gravedigger, wrote to him in miners' slang; he tucked the letter away unread for two years, then found and read it.

The letter said the gravedigger had struck a rich gold ledge while digging a grave and hidden it by burying a notorious woman above it; the gravedigger has since drunk himself to death. The claimant calls her a holy terror.

He knows the dead woman only from campfire gossip and a comic obituary; repeating that she was a holy terror, as if to justify himself, he sinks his pick into her grave, and a raven croaks.

A fort commands the bridge and a company of infantry stands motionless in line to witness the hanging; nobody moves, as military etiquette requires in the presence of death.

After a hard battle, burial parties collect and count the dead; most of the wounded died of neglect while the ground was in dispute, and the enemy's dead are counted more than once for the official report.

The wounded stream past, deaf to his pleas for help; retreating men fire and walk on, and he is sickened that war is ugly and brutal, nothing like the parades held in his honour.

The superintendent jokes that the trustees have decided his application disagrees with them; the old man cries out in despair.

Walking him out, the superintendent pompously explains that under the peculiar circumstances his presence would embarrass the institution; the old man's tracks are already covered by snow.

The old man wanders off into a vacant lot with nowhere to go; on Christmas morning the chairman's son stumbles on his frozen body. He was the home's founder.

The child thinks the bloodied men are clowns and rides one like a horse; the man, whose lower jaw is shot away, throws him off and shakes a fist, and the child hides behind a tree.

A red light rises beyond the trees; the child puts himself at the head of the crawling wounded with his wooden sword and solemnly leads them toward it.

The stones in the creek are red with blood; the strongest of the wounded drink and drown, and the child waves his cap to encourage the rest toward the fire.

An officer lingers uneasily among the dead at sunset, then, when the burial parties leave, strides purposefully into the forest past the moaning wounded he cannot help.

Months later, during a sluggish campaign, the Governor tours the army with his showy civilian staff, and the soldiers in the trenches curse them as ornaments.

They pass the picked skeleton of a donkey still tethered beside a miner's kit, and at the tree the millionaire playfully loops the old rope round his neck, horrifying his wife.

They find an open grave with two skulls and a broken coffin; a young man jumps in, and the millionaire reads aloud the coffin plate with its coarse epitaph for a local woman.

He never boasts and turns remonstrance aside with a joke; when the captain who warned him is killed, he tends the body in the middle of a fire-swept road, and his comrades wish he were not a fool.

He confesses he wants the commission in order to be killed, because his wife has been unfaithful; he does not know the other man's name. The Governor, after a cold insult, grants him a captain's commission.

He drives the swing ever higher until he is nearly horizontal; everyone shouts at him to stop, a woman faints, crowds gather, and suddenly the shouting stops.

The guardian leaves singing a strange chant; the narrator urges the girl to tell him everything and let him act, since she says the man killed her sister and will kill her.

A young woman with strange, disquieting eyes tells the man she loves that she will never marry him; he angrily demands a reason, and her fixed, emotionless stare tames his anger and makes him shiver.

His wife finds him in prison under a false name, and in a private interview he bends her to his will; she leaves broken-hearted, keeps his secret, and then disappears herself.

Years later they return, broken in fortune and health, living quietly under another name; the wife is endlessly devoted and cheerful, and he is sunk in dejection.

The lover's husband, understanding everything, leaves for good; the man spends a year in an asylum with his wife caring for him, and they move near the factory so he can make his daily pilgrimage to the window.

Overhearing again, the narrator sees the girl and her guardian standing like lovers, and hears her calmly ask him to take her life as he took her sister's, and without delay.

She refuses, saying she loves the man above all and will deny everything if he goes to the authorities; then she charms him, and he finds himself in love with her.

She took up with a gambler who slashed her face; she wrote renouncing the engagement and sent a photograph of her scarred face, but he held to her more firmly out of honour. Then her letters stopped.

The civilian shows his pass with a hint of irony and walks on whistling; suddenly the captain draws his revolver and runs after him.

Wandering one day, he sees his former lover at a window; she cries out, leans out too far and falls to her death, and he sits on the pavement cradling her broken body.

He sees the dead man's ghost panning the dust of the other flooded coffins into its own; in the morning the executor is found dead in the cemetery.

Seven years later a white-haired stranger approaches the two in a park, and reveals he is their friend who played the corpse, not the watcher.

Months later, a rich society party passes through; the leader, once a gambler in the camp who narrowly escaped hanging there, shows his wife and friends the hanging tree.

She confesses she is ashamed of her origins before the man she loves, and frightened that a relative of her dead playmate staying at the hotel will recognise and expose her.

She sobs and calls him a thug; he kneels tenderly, declares he has loved her for years, and reveals that he is the ragged childhood playmate she thought dead.

He reaches a burning house and dances before it, then recognises it as his own home and finds his mother dead, killed by a shell; he is a deaf mute and can only make wordless cries.

In the cellar they find a man clasping a dead woman and a dead baby, killed by a shell that broke through the floor above.

The man raises his blackened face and calmly says the house is his, the dead are his wife and child, and he is the captain who shelled it.

He came home to find his wife delirious with fever, far from any help; after three days of nursing she seemed to die. Numb, he prepares her for burial, fumbling, surprised he cannot weep, telling himself it must be all right.

The husband returns late, finds the window open, and his wife cowering; she laughs madly and hands him the baby, which she has crushed to death in her embrace. The woman telling the story falls silent.

A shack shaped like a face stands on a poor hillside terrace; every day at exactly two o'clock a well-dressed man steps out of its door and checks his watch.

He walks round a block, staring over his shoulder at a dusty upper window of a factory where nothing ever appears, and returns home, where his wife, a washerwoman who supports them both, helps him in.

Among restless frontier settlers who kept moving west, one silent man stayed on alone in a log house in the forest, living by selling skins and letting his once-cleared land go back to wilderness.

His cabin has a single window, boarded up for as long as anyone remembers; he looks seventy but is fifty, aged by something besides years. The narrator heard his story from his grandfather.

He sees her reach her father's door, and no panther. He lives alone in a cottage by the forest, publicly known to have been rejected by her.

A whirlpool flings him ashore out of sight; he weeps with joy, then grapeshot sends him running into a forest that seems endless and uncanny.

Exhausted and starving, he follows a strange straight road under unfamiliar stars, hearing whispers in an unknown tongue, his neck swollen and his feet no longer feeling the ground.

A rabbit sends him fleeing in terror; lost and torn by brambles, he cries himself to sleep between two rocks while distant thunder sounds and his mother searches frantically at home.

Waking at dusk, he goes the wrong way and sees strange shapes approaching, many of them, all moving toward the brook.

A farm boy, lost at midnight while searching for missing cows, follows a bridle path through a dark forest and sees a light near a deserted house.

The house is reputed haunted, and the boy himself once helped smash its windows; shaking with fear and guilt, he refuses to turn back and walks past.

The commander orders the skirmish line forward; a young officer in full dress on a white horse with a scarlet blanket gallops up, and the whole line laughs at his vanity.

The narrator introduces the best officer on the general's staff, a tall, handsome, courteous and fearless newcomer from another regiment, conspicuous in full uniform in action.

The narrator, a map-maker on a brigade staff, describes an unsociable new aide nobody liked, and his own dangerous work surveying close to enemy lines.

He sees on the cliff edge a Confederate horseman, motionless as a statue, looking down into the valley where the regiments hide.

Falling through the bridge, he feels agony and swinging, then plunges into the water; he believes the rope has broken and rises toward the surface, determined not to be shot.

His hands seem to free themselves and tear off the noose; in agony, he surfaces and draws a great shrieking breath.

His senses are unnaturally sharp; he sees every leaf and insect, and turning, sees his executioners on the bridge pointing and shouting at him.

The sentinels fire and miss; a lieutenant calmly orders a volley, and he dives deep as the bullets sink around him.

He swims downstream, reasoning coolly about the next volley, as the fort's cannon sends a shot plunging near him; he resolves to watch the gun's smoke.

He reaches his home and his wife comes smiling to meet him, but as he reaches for her there is a blow and blinding light; he was hanged, and his body swings beneath the bridge.

A small child slips away from his poor home into a forest, delighted by freedom and the chance of adventure.

The six-year-old son of a planter who was once a soldier plays at war with a wooden sword, chasing imaginary enemies across a brook far from home.

They are wounded men, hundreds of them, crawling toward the creek on hands and knees; some stop and die, others gesture as if praying.

The ground is littered with the debris of a retreat; a battle had been fought all around the sleeping child hours before, and he heard none of it.

The narrator reflects on how strange the enemy's leavings seem, and reads from the tracks that the enemy withdrew in good order up the hill rather than fleeing.

The whole army watches in silence; the horseman swerves toward a break in the wall, meaning to ride through and see what lies beyond.

He dashes at the wall, then turns and races back; the wall erupts in rifle fire and artillery, he survives the first volley to a great cheer, and shells begin falling among the watching troops.

The narrator traces how fate brought a deserter from Europe to command an enemy battery two miles away, where, idling, he fires a shot at what he takes for enemy officers, and it flies high.

The stray shell smashes a post and brings the shed down on him; half-conscious, he imagines himself buried with his widow kneeling on his grave.

Struggling to free his feet, he fears disturbing the rifle; he recalls a past blunder with a loaded weapon, then distracts himself with the trees and the thought that he faces north, toward his family.

The scout's brother, commanding the picket line, hears a distant crash and notes the time; he is then ordered to advance, since the enemy is thought to have retreated.

The colonel races down the hill with his retinue to the notch, where the sight appals them.

Four guns lie wrecked in the notch; the half-naked, bloodied survivors work the fifth like madmen, sponging it with their comrades' blood, each man replaced as he falls.

Riding over the dead to the gun, the colonel stops the firing; a blackened, fiendish figure turns to him and obeys his signal to withdraw. It is the captain.

The enemy stops firing too, having long since retreated; the brigade camps on the enemy's ground and the colonel's staff settle comfortably in the shattered plantation house, until an orderly reports something wrong in the cellar.

He finds and touches a body that screams; he is a captain whose childhood friend enlisted as a sergeant to stay near him, and who loathes his friend's cynical brother, the regiment's major.

The sergeant's belly has been torn open and his clothes ripped apart; the captain cannot understand the wound until he sees a herd of swine feeding on the fallen nearby.

The friend is still alive, speechless and screaming when touched, his eyes begging for death; the captain repeats his name until he chokes with emotion.

Weeping, he walks away and shoots a wounded horse, watching its long death struggle; then he returns, holds the pistol to his friend's forehead and pulls the trigger, but his last cartridge was spent on the horse.

The prisoner argues there is no such thing as dying, only a last pain; the general, who has a revolver in his lap, shudders and whispers that death is horrible.

The provost-marshal is dead with the knife in his throat and the general badly wounded; the spy cowers in terror while the returning guard tells his story to anyone who will listen; the general orders the spy shot.

Officers think the general delirious, but the adjutant produces his written order and has it carried out; the spy is shot begging for his life, and the general dies peacefully a moment later.

A general warns the Governor that only a line of skirmishers lies ahead; the Governor insists on meeting the captain he commissioned and goes forward alone on foot to a company waiting at the front.

The captain, aged and scarred almost beyond recognition, salutes the Governor formally but will not shake his hand; the Governor begins to say whose hand it is.

Firing breaks out from the front; the captain calmly calls his company into line as bullets fly and wounded men stream back.

The captain's calm sing-song commands steady his raw soldiers into acting like veterans; the Governor, torn between pride and terror, runs when the skirmishers fall back.

Fleeing through the jungle, the Governor sprains his ankle leaping a brook, and sits helpless on the ground.

The Governor finds a letter from the captain's wife confessing her sin and naming him, and quietly pockets it; he jokes with the surgeons, accepts a review in his honour, and does not touch the captain's covered body beside him.

Next morning the captain tells the spy he knew him years before as a deserter awaiting execution, guarded one stormy night by an exhausted soldier ordered to kill him if he rose.

The guard fell asleep at his post; the prisoner could have escaped and left him to be shot, but let him sleep and woke him before the relief came. The spy knew the captain all along; the captain weeps.

After an indecisive day of fighting in rain and mud, the whole army is sullen and does no more than its duty; the general calls it cowardly, his adjutant says it is only cold.

The captain's battery holds a strong earthwork on what, by his compass, seems to be the extreme left flank of the army, with no troops visible beyond.

Alone in the fog, the captain is told by a sergeant that the infantry has been withdrawn, the front is unguarded, and men have heard the enemy's guns moving toward the works.

The division commander reveals another friendly brigade was sent overnight beyond the battery; cannon fire breaks out on the left, the enemy attacks everywhere, and the battery fires steadily into the fog.

Battle begins on the right; rifle fire from the woods kills the man beside him, everyone lies down, and he lies sickened beside the yellowing corpse, unable to turn away without facing from his men.

He lets go of the rope and flies up past a branch, then pitches down with a sickening impact; the hardened soldiers turn sick, and his body lies broken with its arms folded across the breast.

A Union private sits against a pine deep in the forest, far outside the lines, looking as if he were asleep.

He is troubled by the previous night, when he stood sentry at a lonely post in this forest on an over-extended picket line.

The man, prematurely aged, is kept neatly dressed by his wife's scanty earnings; thirty years before, the couple were rich, cultivated and apparently happy, and she was proud of him.

The husband fell in love with a visiting friend's wife; caught leaving her house at night, he tried to bribe the policeman and gave a false name, with only her jewelled portrait on him.

He pleads guilty; the lover, ill, twice refuses to testify, tears up her statement, embraces her children in tears, and finally swears she knows nothing and faints.

He is sentenced to three years, his lawyer having made no defence; on release his wife meets him at the gate and they go abroad, selling everything.

A country schoolmaster lodging at a boarding-house in a resort town for invalids walks home late at dusk by a little-used wooded trail after finishing his report to the trustees.

Resting on a log, he hears unseen voices: a man threatening that she and another will suffer if she does not let things stand, and a woman asking whether he would murder them.

He glimpses a tall man in black and a woman in grey; she sinks to her knees in supplication, and when he springs up to intervene, both vanish.

Afraid of being recognised as an eavesdropper, he leaves; he hears a fine male voice singing an aria that displeases him, and later sees the man in black with the elder sister, and resolves to find out about them honourably.

A month passes without incident; then the elder sister is found dead in bed, and the younger turns on the guardian and accuses him of killing her.

They walk the veranda as she chatters as though bereavement never happened; he feels part of an intrigue and arranges to walk with her the next day, if the guardian is away.

On the walk she is capricious and fascinating, jesting and singing by turns, and he falls deeper in love at every step.

She leads him to a high cliff-top; the guardian appears, saying he saw them from the road, and her face transfigures with love as she greets him.

The accused had been run out of a neighbouring camp and came here just before its whole population followed; living by cards, he is suspected of robbing the sluice boxes at night.

For five years he fights the claims with lawyers, bribes and false witnesses, corrupting the whole territory, and wins; that night a flood topples the monument and exposes the coffin.

The executor, aged and broken by the struggle, now believes absolutely in the dead man's innocence; he has spent the last of the estate on the last witness, and is drawn to the flooded cemetery.

Sitting on the fallen monument, he weeps with remorse, believing he caused an innocent man's death by false accusation, since the mare's owner later swore, for a fee, that the theft was arranged.

The son of a village's leading citizen, breaking a path through fresh snow for his little sister, strikes his foot against something hidden beneath it.

A great, ugly home for poor old men stands on the hill, endowed by a merchant who gave away half a million dollars, then left for abroad; he has never returned and is now only a name carved over the door.

The home's superintendent resents the ungrateful old inmates and dreams of running it for prosperous paying guests; the old men live out their lives and are replaced.

A ragged old man trudges up the street toward the home on a winter evening, plainly an applicant, since poverty is the qualification.

Avoiding the lamp at the main door, he rings at a side door; the superintendent, jovial and dressed to go out and buy Christmas presents for his children, does not invite him in.

In a dusty upper room of an empty house, a body lies under a sheet on a kitchen table beside a candle, an armchair and a reading-stand, with the windows shut and blinds drawn.

He inspects the face under the sheet, pockets matches and blows out the short candle to save it. Elsewhere, three young doctors over punch discuss whether fear of the dead is inherited and incurable.

A wild, white-haired man bursts down the stairs, beating his way through the crowd, and flees into the street; the student calls out the watcher's name and is dragged back.

Upstairs, a doctor examines the body on the table, face contorted and frothing, pronounces it six hours dead, and calls for the coroner.

He says he rose from the table to frighten the watcher, who died of fright; he changed clothes with the body and was never let out. He is now mad, and the two are gamblers.

An epigraph from an old book of marvels claims that a serpent's eye has a magnetic power that draws its victim forward against his will to his death.

The guest, a rich, athletic traveller, is staying with a scientist friend who keeps a wing full of reptiles, from which his wife and daughters are excluded.

Terrible cries ring through the house; they find the guest dead with his face under the bed, and the scientist pulls out the snake. It is stuffed, with shoe buttons for eyes.

A white-haired stranger arrives unnoticed at a mining camp that was deserted two years ago, after the man whose tall tales of gold drew thousands there was shot on the third day.

The abandoned camp is a wreck of skeleton shanties, rotting flumes, torn ground, old boots and bottles.

The stranger ignores the ruins, goes to a hill, searches among the ground until he finds what he seeks, and stakes out a mining claim according to the local law.

The hill is the camp's cemetery, which grew as the camp shrank, complete with a hanging tree and a dangling rope; he has staked his claim among the densest graves.

Six years before, he left his fiancée in the East, who told him he never succeeded at anything and would not come back alive.

He sees that the coffin was buried upside down, the woman face downward.

His senses return oddly sharp but blind to the coffin; he notices the tree, the rope and the coyotes, smells something sickening, and a raven drops past his face.

The millionaire dismisses a glittering rock as fool's gold; his wife, alone, pockets a wallet from an old coat and finds her own letters and photographs addressed to her former fiancé, and she is found dead, her scarred face white.

Through the window he sees a man staring motionless at a table and believes him dead; he pushes his face into the window, an owl shrieks, the man leaps up and puts out the candle, and the boy flees. The previous morning, a writer finds a friend reading his ghost story on a streetcar.

The writer says his friend is ruining his own pleasure by reading a ghost story on a streetcar, likening it to hearing an opera in an office.

He insists that an author has a right to the reader's undivided attention, growing so vehement that the friend notices his pallor and burning eyes.

He says a ghost story must be read alone, at night, by candlelight, if it is to produce the fear the author intends.

The manuscript is the writer's declaration that he will kill himself at midnight on the anniversary of the day his friend, the house's former owner, killed himself in fulfilment of a vow between them.

He is found dead and buried beside his long-dead wife. Years earlier he had come west young and hopeful with a devoted wife who shared every hardship gladly.

Mad with terror he fires his rifle blindly and by the flash sees a panther dragging his wife toward the window; at dawn he finds her throat torn, her fists clenched and a piece of the animal's ear between her teeth. She had not been dead.

He calls late while her aunt is out; she is helpless and in love, conscious that she is only a rough mining heiress, and he leaves after a few moments.

The gossip calls again; she likes him because they were childhood playmates in a mining camp, known by humble nicknames.

She recalls a third, ragged playmate who scavenged waste rock to feed his mother and defended her; after her father struck it rich they parted, and she heard the boy was later killed.

Having seen him from her window, she goes to the beach alone; he asks to sit or walk with her, and she stammers that she would be pleased to do anything.

He helps her up and will not let go of her hand; her leg has gone to sleep and she sinks, he holds her coolly, and mortified she pushes free and falls in the sand.

He survived the bullet and came at the gossip's suggestion; the gossip also invented the dark mystery to rouse her curiosity. She is engaged.

In a pitch-dark log cabin deep in the forest a woman crouches against the wall clutching a child, watched by something unseen.

The suitor does not understand; she explains she is the second child, born three months after that night at the cost of her mother's life, and asks whether such a person can be sane. He cannot bring himself to take her hand.

He recalls her solitary life and fear of the night and decides she is mad; when he tries to question her she says they cannot marry and flees into the dark woods, and he glimpses shining eyes and runs after her shouting a warning.