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Updated: May 17, 2025
The odds are too great courage was not made for so rough use as that. One sole conviction now had the man in possession: that the body had moved. It lay nearer to the edge of its plot of light there could be no doubt of it. It had also moved its arms, for, look, they are both in the shadow! A breath of cold air struck Byring full in the face; the boughs of trees above him stirred and moaned.
Byring turned away his eyes and began humming a tune, but he broke off in the middle of a bar and looked at the dead body. Its presence annoyed him, though he could hardly have had a quieter neighbor. He was conscious, too, of a vague, indefinable feeling that was new to him. It was not fear, but rather a sense of the supernatural in which he did not at all believe.
Distinctly he heard behind him a stealthy tread, as of some wild animal, and dared not look over his shoulder. Had the soulless living joined forces with the soulless dead? was it an animal? Ah, if he could but be assured of that! But by no effort of will could he now unfix his gaze from the face of the dead man. I repeat that Lieutenant Byring was a brave and intelligent man.
Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to incur.
In his small way the author of these dispositions was something of a strategist; if Napoleon had planned as intelligently at Waterloo he would have won that memorable battle and been overthrown later. Second-Lieutenant Brainerd Byring was a brave and efficient officer, young and comparatively inexperienced as he was in the business of killing his fellow-men.
There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! Surrounded at a little distance by armed and watchful friends, Byring felt utterly alone.
A straggling group that had followed back one of the roads, as instructed, suddenly sprang away into the bushes as half a hundred horsemen thundered by them, striking wildly with their sabres as they passed. At headlong speed these mounted madmen shot past the spot where Byring had sat, and vanished round an angle of the road, shouting and firing their pistols.
Byring suddenly became conscious of a pain in his right hand. He withdrew his eyes from his enemy and looked at it. He was grasping the hilt of his drawn sword so tightly that it hurt him. He observed, too, that he was leaning forward in a strained attitude crouching like a gladiator ready to spring at the throat of an antagonist. His teeth were clenched and he was breathing hard.
The chest seemed unnaturally prominent, but the abdomen had sunk in, leaving a sharp projection at the line of the lower ribs. The arms were extended, the left knee was thrust upward. The whole posture impressed Byring as having been studied with a view to the horrible. "Bah!" he exclaimed; "he was an actor he knows how to be dead."
They turned him on his back and the surgeon removed it. "Gad!" said the captain "It is Byring!" adding, with a glance at the other, "They had a tough tussle." The surgeon was examining the sword. It was that of a line officer of Federal infantry exactly like the one worn by the captain. It was, in fact, Byring's own.
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