He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children.  The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift—­all had distracted him.  And now he became conscious of a new disturbance.  Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality.  He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by—­it seemed both.  Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell.  He awaited each stroke with impatience and—­he knew not why—­apprehension.  The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening.  With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness.  They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek.  What he heard was the ticking of his watch.

He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him.  “If I could free my hands,” he thought, “I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream.  By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home.  My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader’s farthest advance.”

As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man’s brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant.  The sergeant stepped aside.

II

Peyton Farquhar was a well-to-do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family.  Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause.  Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with the gallant army that had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction.  That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in war time.  Meanwhile he did what he could.  No service was too humble for him to perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.

One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water.  Mrs. Farquhar was only too happy to serve him with her own white hands.  While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front.