An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce — A Rope, a River, and a Reckoning

Early morning on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama. Federal soldiers have laid a loose plank across the ties. A planter in a good frock coat stands on one end of it, hands bound, a rope closely around his neck. His wife and children are thirty miles away, still beyond the Union lines. The water below runs fast and gold in the sun, and he can't stop watching it.

Ambrose Bierce served four years in the Union army, and he wrote this in 1890 with a soldier's eye for every rifle, rope and order. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge remains one of the most widely read short stories in American literature.

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