A Horman in the Sky
Ambro Bierce
ONE SUNNY AFTERNOON in the autumn of the year 1861 a soldier lay in 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 looly 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 be might have been thought to be dead. He was asleep at his post of duty. But if detected be 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 a on the summit for perhaps one hundred yards. There it turned southward again and went zigzagging downward through the forest. At the salient of that cond 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 down
ward one thousand feet to the tops of the pines. The angle where the soldier lay was on another spur of the same cliff. Had be 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 veral acres in extent. Its green was more vivid than that of the enclosing forest. Away beyond it ro a line of giant cliffs similar to tho upon which we are suppod 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 obrvation it emed 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 make it a theatre of war; concealed in the forest at the bottom of that military rat-trap, in which half a hundred men in posssion of the exits might have starved an army to submission, lay five regiments of Federal infantry. They had marched all the previous day and night and were resting. At nightfall they would take to the road again, climb to the place where their unfaithful ntinel now slept, and descending the other slope of the ridge fall upon a camp of the enemy at about midnight. Their hope was to surpri it, for the road led to the rear of it. In ca of failure, their position would be perilous in the extreme; and fall they surely would should accident or vigilance appri the enemy of the movement.
The sleeping ntinel in the clump of laurel was a young Virginian named Carter Dru. He was the son of wealthy parents, an only child, and had known such ea and cultivation and high living as wealth and taste were able to command in the mountain country of western Virginia. His home was but a few miles from where he now lay. One morning he had rin from the breakfast-table and said, quietly but gravely: "Father, a Union regiment has arrived at Grafton. I am going to join it."
The father lifted his leonine head, looked at the son a moment in silence, and replied: "Well, go, sir, and whatever may occur do what you conceive to be your duty. Virginia, to which you are a traitor, must get on without you. Should we both live to the end of the war, we will speak further of the matter. Your mother, as the physician has informed you, is in a most critical condition; at the best she cannot be with us longer than a few weeks, but that time is precious. It would be better not to disturb her."
So Carter Dru, bowing reverently to his father, who returned the salute with a stately courtesy that masked a breaking heart, left the home of his childhood to go soldiering. By conscience and courage, by deeds of devotion and daring, he soon commended himlf to his fellows and his officers; and it was to the qualities and to some knowledge of the country that he owed his lection for his prent perilous duty at the extreme outpost. Nevertheless, fatigue had been stronger than resolution and he had fallen asleep. What good or bad angel came in a dream to rou him from his state of crime, who shall say? Without a movement, without a sound, in the profound silence and the languor of the late afternoon, some invisible mesnger of fate touched with unaling finger the eyes of his
consciousness - whispered into the ear of his spirit the mysterious awakening word which no human lips ever have spoken, no human memory ever has recalled. He quietly raid his forehead from his arm and looked between the masking stems of the laurels, instinctively closing his right hand about the stock of his rifle.
His first feeling was a keen artistic delight. On a colossal pedestal, the cliff, -motionless at the extreme edge of the capping rock and sharply outlined against the sky, -was an equestrian statue of impressive dignity. The figure of the man sat the figure of the hor, straight and soldierly, but with the repo of a Grecian god carved In the marble which limits the suggestion of activity. The gray costume harmonized with its aerial background; the metal of accoutrement and caparison was softened and subdued by the shadow; the animal's skin had no points of high light. A carbine strikingly foreshortened lay across the pommel of the saddle, kept in place by the right hand grasping it at the "grip;" the left hand, holding the bridle rein, was invisible. In silhouette against the sky the profile of the hor was cut with the sharpness of a cameo; it looked across the heights of air to the confronting cliffs beyond. The face of the rider, turned slightly away, showed only an outli
ne of temple and beard; lie was looking downward to the bottom of the valley. Magnified by its lift against the sky and by the soldier's testifying n of the formidableness of a near enemy the group appeared of heroic, almost colossal, size.
For an instant Dru had a strange, half-defined feeling that he had slept to the end of the war and was looking upon a noble work of art reared upon that eminence to commemorate the deeds of an heroic past of which he had been an inglorious part. The feeling was dispelled by a slight movement of the group: the hor, without moving its feet, had drawn its body slightly backward from the verge; the man remained immobile as before. Broad awake and keenly alive to the significance of the situation, Dru now brought the butt of his rifle against his cheek by cautiously pushing the barrel forward through the bushes, cocked the piece, and glancing through the sights covered a vital spot of the horman's breast. A touch upon the trigger and all would have been well with Carter Dru. At that instant the horman turned his head and looked in the direction of his concealed foeman -emed to look into his very face, into his eyes, into his brave, compassionate heart.
Is it then so terrible to kill an enemy in war -au enemy who has surprid a cret vital to the safety of one's lf and comrades-an enemy more formidable for his knowledge than all his army for its numbers? Carter Dru grew pale; he shook in every limb, turned faint, and saw the statuesque group before him as black figures, rising, falling, moving unsteadily in arcs of circles in a fiery sky. His hand fell away from his weapon, his head slowly dropped until his face rested on the leaves in which he lay. This courageous gentleman and hardy soldier was near swooning from intensity of emotion.
It was not for long; in another moment his face was raid from earth, his hands resumed their places on the rifle, his forefinger sought the trigger; mind, heart, and eyes were clear, conscience and reason sound. He could not hope to capture that enemy; to alarm him would but nd him dashing to his camp with his fatal news. The duty of the soldier was plain: the man must be shot dead from ambush -without warning, without a moment's spiritual preparation, with never so much as an unspoken prayer, he must be nt to his account. But no -there is a hope; he may have discovered nothing - perhaps he is but admiring the sublimity of the landscape. If permitted, he may turn and ride carel
essly away in the direction whence he came. Surely it will be possible to judge at the instant of his withdrawing whether he knows. It may well be that his fixity of attention - Dru turned his head and looked through the deeps of air downward, as from the surface to the bottom of a translucent a. He saw creeping across the green meadow a sinuous line of figures of men and hors -some foolish commander was permitting the soldiers of his escort to water their beasts in the open, in plain view from a dozen summits!
Dru withdrew his eyes from the valley and fixed them again upon the group of man and hor in the sky, and again it was through the sights of his rifle. But this time his aim was at the hor. In his memory, as if they were a divine mandate, rang the words of his father at their parting: "Whatever may occur, do what you conceive to be your duty." He was calm now. His teeth were firmly but not rigidly clod; his nerves were as tranquil as a sleeping babe's - not a tremor affected any muscle of his body; his breathing, until suspended in the act of taking aim, was regular and slow. Duty had conquered; the spirit had said to the body: "Peace, be still." He fired.
An officer of the Federal force, who in a spirit of adventure or in quest of knowledge had left the hidden bivouac in the valley, and with aimless feet had made his way to the lower edge of a small open space near the foot of the cliff, was considering what he had to gain by pushing his exploration further. At a distance of a quarter-mile before him, but apparently at a stone's throw, ro from its fringe of pines the gigantic face of rock, towering to so great a height above him that it made him giddy to look up to where its edge cut a sharp, rugged line against the sky. It prented a clean, vertical profile against a background of blue sky to a point half the way down, and of distant hills, hardly less blue, thence to the tops of the trees at its ba. Lifting his eyes to the dizzy altitude of its summit the officer saw an astonishing sight-a man on horback riding down into the valley through the air!
Straight upright sat the rider, in military fashion, with a firm at in the saddle, a strong clutch upon the rein to hold his charger from too impetuous a plunge. From his bare head his long hair streamed upward, waving like a plume. His hands were concealed in the cloud of the hor's lifted mane. The animal's-body was as level as if every hoof-stroke e
ncountered the resistant earth. Its motions were tho of a wild gallop, but even as the officer looked they cead, with all the legs thrown sharply forward as in the act of alighting from a leap. But this was a flight!
Filled with amazement and terror by this apparition of a horman in the sky -half believing himlf the chon scribe of some new Apocalyp, the officer was overcome by the intensity of his emotions; his legs failed him and he fell. Almost at the same Instant he heard a crashing sound in the trees - a sound that died without an echo - and all was still.
The officer ro to his feet, trembling. The familiar nsation of an abraded shin recalled his dazed faculties. Pulling himlf together he ran rapidly obliquely away from the cliff to a point distant from its foot; thereabout he expected to find his man; and thereabout he naturally failed. In the fleeting instant of his vision his imagination had been so wrought upon by the apparent grace and ea and intention of the marvelous performance that it did not occur to him that the line of march of aerial cavalry is directly downward, and that he could find the objects of his arch at the very foot of the cliff. A half-hour later he retur
ned to camp.
This officer was a wi man; he knew better than to tell an incredible truth. He said nothing of what he had en. But when the commander asked him if in his scout he had learned anything of advantage to the expedition he answered:
"Yes, sir; there is no road leading down into this valley from the southward."
The commander, knowing better, smiled.
