Farquhar, smiling, "what could he accomplish?"

The soldier reflected. "I was there a month ago," he replied. "I
observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of
driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It is
now dry and would burn like tinder."

The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He
thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An
hour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, going
northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal
scout.

III

As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost
consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was
awakened--ages later, it seemed to him--by the pain of a sharp
pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen,
poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every
fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well
defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid
periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him
to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of
nothing but a feeling of fullness--of congestion. These sensations
were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature
was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was
torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud,
of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material
substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a