An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge: An American Trilogy

by Ambrose Bierce

He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble.

The man with the book was not reading aloud, and no one spoke; all seemed to be waiting for something to occur; the dead man only was without expectation.

Unfortunately, our feelings do not always respect the law of probabilities, and to me that evening, the possible and the impossible were equally disquieting.

I was in a great city in a foreign land - a city whose people were of my own race, with minor differences of speech and costume; yet precisely what these were I could not say; my sense of them was indistinct.

“I am not so superstitious as some of your physicians - men of science, as you are pleased to be called,” said Hawver, replying to an accusation that had not been made.

For several weeks I had been observing in him a growing habit of delay in answering even the most trivial of commonplace questions. His air, however, was that of preoccupation rather than deliberation: one might have said that he had “something on his mind.”

He did not at once remove his eyes; that which we do not wish to see has a strange fascination, sometimes irresistible.