I

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down
into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his
back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck.
It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack
fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers
supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his
executioners--two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a
sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short
remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of
his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge
stood with his rifle in the position known as "support," that is to say,
vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the
forearm thrown straight across the chest--a formal and unnatural
position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to
be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the centre of
the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that
traversed it.

Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran
straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost
to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of
the stream was open ground--a gentle acclivity topped with a stockade of
vertical tree trunks, loop-holed for rifles, with a single embrasure
through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the
bridge. Mid-way of the slope between bridge and fort were the
spectators--a single company of infantry in line, at "parade rest," the
butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly