A wealthy planter and slave owner, Peyton Farquhar, decides to sabotage the nearby railroad in order to help Confederate soldiers. His action earns him a death sentence. Awaiting his hanging, Farquahar is terrified by a clanging sound—the ticking of his watch—as the seconds flash past, spelling his doom. Though he falls through the bridge, he lands in the river:
“The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river!–the idea seemed to him ludicrous.”
Farquhar swims to safety amid a hail of bullets and journeys back to his home through hallucinations of glorious natural beauty, all the while thinking of his wife and children. This was the first short story I ever remember reading as a teenager, and the first time I realized that a tale did not have to be linear, did not have to follow a specific path, and could twist like a serpent at the last moment, landing a final, venomous bite on the reader.
First published in the San Francisco Examiner, 1890 and widely available
A Personal Anthology 