Yes, all was right. And all remained right. I stayed up all night to make sure of that. Nothing happened. I was unspeakably glad to see the dawn come again, and be able to telegraph the Department that the Stars and Stripes still floated over Fort Trumbull.
An immense pressure was lifted from my breast. Still I did not relax vigilance, of course, nor effort either; the case was too grave for that. I had up my prisoners, one by one, and harried them by the hour, trying to get them to confess, but it was a failure. They only gnashed their teeth and tore their hair, and revealed nothing.
About noon came tidings of my missing boy. He had been seen on the road, tramping westward, some eight miles out, at six in the morning. I started a cavalry lieutenant and a private on his track at once. They came in sight of him twenty miles out. He had climbed a fence and was wearily dragging himself across a slushy field toward a large old-fashioned mansion in the edge of a village. They rode through a bit of woods, made a detour, and closed up on the house from the opposite side; then dismounted and skurried into the kitchen. Nobody there. They slipped into the next room, which was also unoccupied; the door from that room into the front or sitting room was open. They were about to step through it when they heard a low voice; it was somebody praying. So they halted reverently, and the lieutenant put his head in and saw an old man and an old woman kneeling in a corner of that sitting-room. It was the old man that was praying, and just as he was finishing his prayer, the Wicklow boy opened the front door and stepped in. Both of those old people sprang at him and smothered him with embraces, shouting—
“Our boy! our darling! God be praised. The lost is found! He that was dead is alive again!”
Well, sir, what do you think! That young imp was born and reared on that homestead, and had never been five miles away from it in all his life, till the fortnight before he loafed into my quarters and gulfed me with that maudlin yarn of his! It’s as true as gospel. That old man was his father—a learned old retired clergyman; and that old lady was his mother.
Let me throw in a word or two of explanation concerning that boy and his performances. It turned out that he was a ravenous devourer of dime novels and sensation-story papers—therefore, dark mysteries and gaudy heroisms were just in his line. Then he had read newspaper reports of the stealthy goings and comings of rebel spies in our midst, and of their lurid purposes and their two or three startling achievements, till his imagination was all aflame on that subject. His constant comrade for some months had been a Yankee youth of much tongue and lively fancy, who had served for a couple of years as “mud clerk” (that is, subordinate purser) on certain of the packet-boats plying between New Orleans and points two or three hundred miles up the Mississippi—hence his easy facility in handling the names and other details pertaining to that region. Now I had spent two or three months in that part of the country before the war; and I knew just enough about it to be easily taken in by that boy, whereas a born Louisianian would probably have caught him tripping before he had talked fifteen minutes. Do you know the reason he said he would rather die than explain certain of his treasonable enigmas? Simply because he couldn’t explain them!—they had no meaning; he had fired them out of his imagination without forethought or afterthought; and so, upon sudden call, he wasn’t able to invent an explanation of them. For instance, he couldn’t reveal what was hidden in the “sympathetic ink” letter, for the ample reason that there wasn’t anything hidden in it; it was blank paper only. He hadn’t put anything into a gun, and had never intended to—for his letters were all written to imaginary persons, and when he hid one in the stable he always removed the one he had put there the day before; so he was not acquainted with that knotted string, since he was seeing it for the first time when I showed it to him; but as soon as I had let him find out where it came from, he straightway adopted it, in his romantic fashion, and got some fine effects out of it. He invented Mr. “Gaylord”; there wasn’t any 15 Bond Street, just then—it had been pulled down three months before. He invented the “Colonel”; he invented the glib histories of those unfortunates whom I captured and confronted with him; he invented “B. B.”; he even invented No. 166, one may say, for he didn’t know there was such a number in the Eagle Hotel until we went there. He stood ready to invent anybody or anything whenever it was wanted. If I called for “outside” spies, he promptly described strangers whom he had seen at the hotel, and whose names he had happened to hear. Ah, he lived in a gorgeous, mysterious, romantic world during those few stirring days, and I think it was real to him, and that he enjoyed it clear down to the bottom of his heart.
But he made trouble enough for us, and just no end of humiliation. You see, on account of him we had fifteen or twenty people under arrest and confinement in the fort, with sentinels before their doors. A lot of the captives were soldiers and such, and to them I didn’t have to apologize; but the rest were first-class citizens, from all over the country, and no amount of apologies was sufficient to satisfy them. They just fumed and raged and made no end of trouble! And those two ladies—one was an Ohio Congressman’s wife, the other a Western bishop’s sister—well, the scorn and ridicule and angry tears they poured out on me made up a keepsake that was likely to make me remember them for a considerable time—and I shall. That old lame gentleman with the goggles was a college president from Philadelphia, who had come up to attend his nephew’s funeral. He had never seen young Wicklow before, of course. Well, he not only missed the funeral, and got jailed as a rebel spy, but Wicklow had stood up there in my quarters and coldly described him as a counterfeiter, rigger-trader, horse-thief, and fire-bug from the most notorious rascal-nest in Galveston; and this was a thing which that poor old gentleman couldn’t seem to get over at all.
And the War Department! But, O my soul, let’s draw the curtain over that part!
* * *
—
NOTE.—I showed my manuscript to the Major, and he said: “Your unfamiliarity with military matters has betrayed you into some little mistakes. Still, they are picturesque ones—let them go; military men will smile at them, the rest won’t detect them. You have got the main facts of the history right, and have set them down just about as they occurred.”—M. T.
PARKER ADDERSON, PHILOSOPHER
AMBROSE BIERCE
AMBROSE GWINNETT BIERCE (1842–1914?) was a famously cynical, intolerant, and angry writer, but perhaps less well-known is that his life was much the same—and with good reason. With the exception of his brother Albert, he loathed his entire rather large family (he was one of thirteen children, all of whose names began with the letter A), but he was following in his family’s footprints, as his father, Marcus Aurelius Bierce, had detested everyone in his family as well, barring his brother Lucius Verus.
Ambrose left his home at fifteen to become a printer’s devil and joined the Union army as soon as the Civil War broke out, serving with bravery and honor, especially at the battle of Shiloh. His military trials and encounters served as the background for many of his best stories, notably Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). After his discharge from the army he moved to San Francisco to join Albert and quickly became a newspaperman, becoming notorious for his cartoons and his satirical writings.
Soon after his marriage in 1871, he and his wife moved to England but his poor health, a combination of war wounds and asthma, drove him back to California five years later, where he resumed his journalistic career while also writing fiction. During most of his lifetime, he was more famous as a newspaperman than a fiction writer, deeply admired by William Randolph Hearst, who gave him his own influential column and promoted his work relentlessly until Bierce retired in 1909.
At the age of seventy-one, Bierce decided to tour the Civil War battlefields on which he fought as a young man. He later crossed the border into Mexico and joined Pancho Villa’s army as an observer in the civil war between Villa and Carranza. It is in Mexico that he disappeared without trace. His last recor
ded word was a letter written to a friend on December 26, 1913. Rumors abound that he had been killed by a firing squad, that he had committed suicide, or that he had been killed by one side or the other in battle. Despite several investigations into his disappearance, no concrete evidence was ever discovered and his death remains a great mystery.
“Parker Adderson, Philosopher” was originally published in the February 22, 1891, issue of the San Francisco Examiner; it was first published in book form in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (San Francisco, E. L. G. Steele, 1891).
PARKER ADDERSON, PHILOSOPHER
AMBROSE BIERCE
“PRISONER, what is your name?”
“As I am to lose it at daylight tomorrow morning, it is hardly worth concealing. Parker Adderson.”
“Your rank?”
“A somewhat humble one; commissioned officers are too precious to be risked in the perilous business of a spy. I am a sergeant.”
“Of what regiment?”
“You must excuse me; if I answered that it might, for anything I know, give you an idea of whose forces are in your front. Such knowledge as that is what I came into your lines to obtain, not to impart.”
“You are not without wit.”
“If you have the patience to wait, you will find me dull enough tomorrow.”
“How do you know that you are to die tomorrow morning?”
“Among spies captured by night that is the custom. It is one of the nice observances of the profession.”
The General so far laid aside the dignity appropriate to a Confederate officer of high rank and wide renown as to smile. But no one in his power and out of his favour would have drawn any happy augury from that outward and visible sign of approval. It was neither genial nor infectious; it did not communicate itself to the other persons exposed to it—the caught spy who had provoked it and the armed guard who had brought him into the tent and now stood a little apart, watching his prisoner in the yellow candle-light. It was no part of that warrior’s duty to smile; he had been detailed for another purpose. The conversation was resumed; it was, in fact, a trial for a capital offence.
“You admit, then, that you are a spy—that you came into my camp disguised as you are, in the uniform of a Confederate soldier, to obtain information secretly regarding the numbers and disposition of my troops?”
“Regarding, particularly, their numbers. Their disposition I already knew. It is morose.”
The General brightened again; the guard, with a severer sense of his responsibility, accentuated the austerity of his expression and stood a trifle more erect than before. Twirling his grey slouch hat round and round upon his forefinger, the spy took a leisurely survey of his surroundings. They were simple enough. The tent was a common “wall tent,” about eight feet by ten in dimensions, lighted by a single tallow-candle stuck into the haft of a bayonet, which was itself stuck into a pine-table, at which the general sat, now busily writing and apparently forgetful of his unwilling guest. An old rag-carpet covered the earthen floor; an older hair-trunk, a second chair, and a roll of blankets were about all else that the tent contained; in General Clavering’s command, Confederate simplicity and penury of “pomp and circumstance” had attained their highest development. On a large nail driven into the tent-pole at the entrance was suspended a sword-belt supporting a long sabre, a pistol in its holster and, absurdly enough, a bowie knife. Of that most unmilitary weapon it was the General’s habit to explain that it was a cherished souvenir of the peaceful days when he was a civilian.
It was a stormy night. The rain cascaded upon the canvas in torrents, with the dull, drum-like sound familiar to dwellers in tents. As the whooping blasts charged upon it the frail structure shook and swayed and strained at its confining stakes and ropes.
The General finished writing, folded the half sheet of paper, and spoke to the soldier guarding Adderson: “Here, Tassman, take that to the adjutant-general; then return.”
“And the prisoner, General?” said the soldier, saluting, with an inquiring glance in the direction of that unfortunate.
“Do as I said,” replied the officer, curtly.
The soldier took the note and ducked himself out of the tent. General Clavering turned his handsome, clean-cut face toward the Federal spy, looked him in the eyes, not unkindly, and said: “It is a bad night, my man.”
“For me, yes.”
“Do you guess what I have written?”
“Something worth reading, I dare say. And—perhaps it is my vanity—I venture to suppose that I am mentioned in it.”
“Yes; it is a memorandum for an order to be read to the troops at reveille concerning your execution. Also some notes for the guidance of the provost-marshal in arranging the details of that event.”
“I hope, General, the spectacle will be intelligently arranged, for I shall attend it myself.”
“Have you any arrangements of your own that you wish to make? Do you wish to see a chaplain, for example?”
“I could hardly secure a longer rest for myself by depriving him of some of his.”
“Good God, man! do you mean to go to your death with nothing but jokes upon your lips? Do you not know that this is a serious matter?”
“How can I know that? I have never been dead in all my life. I have heard that death is a serious matter, but never from any of those who have experienced it.”
The General was silent for a moment; the man interested, perhaps amused, him—a type not previously encountered.
“Death,” he said, “is at least a loss—a loss of such happiness as we have, and of opportunities for more.”
“A loss of which we will never be conscious can be borne with composure and therefore expected without apprehension. You must have observed, General, that of all the dead men with whom it is your soldierly pleasure to strew your path, none shows signs of regret.”
“If the being dead is not a regrettable condition, yet the becoming so—the act of dying—appears to be distinctly disagreeable in one who has not lost the power to feel.”
“Pain is disagreeable, no doubt. I never suffer it without more or less discomfort. But he who lives longest is most exposed to it. What you call dying is simply the last pain—there is really no such thing as dying. Suppose, for illustration, that I attempt to escape. You lift the revolver that you are courteously concealing in your lap, and——”
The General blushed like a girl, then laughed softly, disclosing his brilliant teeth, made a slight inclination of his handsome head, and said nothing. The spy continued: “You fire, and I have in my stomach what I did not swallow. I fall, but am not dead. After a half hour of agony I am dead. But at any given instant of that half hour I was either alive or dead. There is no transition period.
“When I am hanged tomorrow morning it will be quite the same; while conscious I shall be living; when dead, unconscious. Nature appears to have ordered the matter quite in my interest—the way that I should have ordered it myself. It is so simple,” he added with a smile, “that it seems hardly worth while to be hanged at all.”
At the finish of his remarks there was a long silence. The General sat impassive, looking into the man’s face, but apparently not attentive to what had been said. It was as if his eyes had mounted guard over the prisoner, while his mind concerned itself with other matters. Presently he drew a long, deep breath, shuddered, as one awakened from a dreadful dream, and exclaimed almost inaudibly: “Death is horrible!”—this man of death.
“It was horrible to our savage ancestors,” said the spy, gravely, “because they had not enough intelligence to dissociate the idea of consciousness from the idea of the physical forms in which it is manifested—as an even lower order of intelligence, that of the monkey, for example, may be unable to imagine a house without inhabitants, and seeing a ruined hut fancies a suffering occupant. To us it is horrible because we have inherited the tenden
cy to think it so, accounting for the notion by wild and fanciful theories of another world—as names of places give rise to legends explaining them, and reasonless conduct to philosophies in justification. You can hang me, General, but there your power of evil ends; you cannot condemn me to heaven.”
The General appeared not to have heard; the spy’s talk had merely turned his thoughts into an unfamiliar channel, but there they pursued their will independently to conclusions of their own. The storm had ceased, and something of the solemn spirit of the night had imparted itself to his reflections, giving them the sombre tinge of a supernatural dread. Perhaps there was an element of prescience in it. “I should not like to die,” he said—“not tonight.”
He was interrupted—if, indeed, he had intended to speak further—by the entrance of an officer of his staff, Captain Hasterlick, the Provost-Marshal. This recalled him to himself; the absent look passed away from his face.
“Captain,” he said, acknowledging the officer’s salute, “this man is a Yankee spy captured inside our lines with incriminating papers on him. He has confessed. How is the weather?”
“The storm is over, sir, and the moon shining.”
“Good; take a file of men, conduct him at once to the parade-ground, and shoot him.”
A sharp cry broke from the spy’s lips. He threw himself forward, thrust out his neck, expanded his eyes, clenched his hands.
“Good God!” he cried hoarsely, almost inarticulately; “you do not mean that! You forget—I am not to die until morning.”
“I have said nothing of morning,” replied the General, coldly; “that was an assumption of your own. You die now.”
“But, General, I beg—I implore you to remember; I am to hang! It will take some time to erect the gallows—two hours—an hour. Spies are hanged; I have rights under military law. For Heaven’s sake, General, consider how short——”
The Big Book of Espionage Page 114