An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and Other Stories

The Governor was absently tapping his desk with a pencil; he did not immediately reply. After a while he said: 'I have heard that there are all kinds of men in the world, so I suppose there are some like that, and doubtless you think yourself one. I've known you a long time and--pardon me--I don't think so.'

'Then I am to understand that my application is denied?'

'Unless you can remove my belief that your Southern sympathies are in some degree a disqualification, yes. I do not doubt your good faith, and I know you to be abundantly fitted by intelligence and special training for the duties of an officer. Your convictions, you say, favor the Union cause, but I prefer a man with his heart in it. The heart is what men fight with.'

'Look here, Governor,' said the younger man, with a smile that had more light than warmth: 'I have something up my sleeve--a qualification which I had hoped it would not be necessary to mention. A great military authority has given a simple recipe for being a good soldier: ‘Try always to get yourself killed.' It is with that purpose that I wish to enter the service. I am not, perhaps, much of a patriot, but I wish to be dead.'

The Governor looked at him rather sharply, then a little coldly. 'There is a simpler and franker way,' he said.

'In my family, sir,' was the reply, 'we do not do that--no Armisted has ever done that.'

A long silence ensued and neither man looked at the other. Presently the Governor lifted his eyes from the pencil, which had resumed its tapping, and said:

'Who is she?'

'My wife.'

The Governor tossed the pencil into the desk, rose and walked two or three times across the room. Then he turned to Armisted, who also had risen, looked at him more coldly than before and said: 'But the man--would it not be better that he--could not the country spare him better than it can spare you? Or are the Armisteds opposed to ‘the unwritten law'?'

The Armisteds, apparently, could feel an insult: the face of the younger man flushed, then paled, but he subdued himself to the service of his purpose.

'The man's identity is unknown to me,' he said, calmly enough.

'Pardon me,' said the Governor, with even less of visible contrition than commonly underlies those words. After a moment's reflection he added: 'I shall send you to-morrow a captain's commission in the Tenth Infantry, now at Nashville, Tennessee. Good night.'

'Good night, sir. I thank you.'

Left alone, the Governor remained for a time motionless, leaning against his desk. Presently he shrugged his shoulders as if throwing off a burden. 'This is a bad business,' he said.

Seating himself at a reading-table before the fire, he took up the book nearest his hand, absently opening it. His eyes fell upon this sentence:

'When God made it necessary for an unfaithful wife to lie about her husband in justification of her own sins He had the tenderness to endow men with the folly to believe her.'

He looked at the title of the book; it was, His Excellency the Fool.

He flung the volume into the fire.

II

How to Say What is Worth Hearing

The enemy, defeated in two days of battle at Pittsburg Landing, had sullenly retired to Corinth, whence he had come. For manifest incompetence Grant, whose beaten army had been saved from destruction and capture by Buell's soldierly activity and skill, had been relieved of his command, which nevertheless had not been given to Buell, but to Halleck, a man of unproved powers, a theorist, sluggish, irresolute. Foot by foot his troops, always deployed in line-of-battle to resist the enemy's bickering skirmishers, always entrenching against the columns that never came, advanced across the thirty miles of forest and swamp toward an antagonist prepared to vanish at contact, like a ghost at cock-crow. It was a campaign of 'excursions and alarums,' of reconnoissances and counter-marches, of cross-purposes and countermanded orders. For weeks the solemn farce held attention, luring distinguished civilians from fields of political ambition to see what they safely could of the horrors of war. Among these was our friend the Governor. At the headquarters of the army and in the camps of the troops from his State he was a familiar figure, attended by the several members of his personal staff, showily horsed, faultlessly betailored and bravely silk-hatted. Things of charm they were, rich in suggestions of peaceful lands beyond a sea of strife. The bedraggled soldier looked up from his trench as they passed, leaned upon his spade and audibly damned them to signify his sense of their ornamental irrelevance to the austerities of his trade.