TALES OF SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS (26 Stories in One eBook). Амброз Бирс

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      Ambrose Bierce

      TALES OF SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS

      (26 Stories in One eBook)

      Including Chickamauga, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Mocking-Bird and more

      Published by

      Books

      - Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -

       [email protected]

      2017 OK Publishing

      ISBN 978-80-272-1848-6

      Table of Contents

       Preface to the First Edition

      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

      Preface to the First Edition

       Table of Contents

      Denied existence by the chief publishing houses of the country, this book owes itself to Mr. E.L.G. Steele, merchant, of this city. In attesting Mr. Steele’s faith in his judgment and his friend, it will serve its author’s main and best ambition.

      A.B.

      SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 4, 1891.

      Soldiers

       Table of Contents

      A Horseman in the Sky

       Table of Contents

      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 door-yard, 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