A Horseman in the Sky (in Short Story Collection Vol. 057 )

MP3 Audio CD. A Horseman in the Sky (in Short Story Collection Vol. 057 )

I

One sunny afternoon in the autumn of the year 1861 a soldier lay in a
clump of laurel by the side of a road in western Virginia. He lay at
full length upon his stomach, his feet resting upon the toes, his head
upon the left forearm. His extended right hand loosely grasped his
rifle. But for the somewhat methodical disposition of his limbs and a
slight rhythmic movement of the cartridge-box at the back of his belt he
might have been thought to be dead. He was asleep at his post of duty.
But if detected he would be dead shortly afterward, death being the just
and legal penalty of his crime.

The clump of laurel in which the criminal lay was in the angle of a road
which after ascending southward a steep acclivity to that point turned
sharply to the west, running along the summit for perhaps one hundred
yards. There it turned southward again and went zigzagging downward
through the forest. At the salient of that second angle was a large flat
rock, jutting out northward, overlooking the deep valley from which the
road ascended. The rock capped a high cliff; a stone dropped from its
outer edge would have fallen sheer downward one thousand feet to the
tops of the pines. The angle where the soldier lay was on another spur
of the same cliff. Had he been awake he would have commanded a view, not
only of the short arm of the road and the jutting rock, but of the
entire profile of the cliff below it. It might well have made him giddy
to look.

The country was wooded everywhere except at the bottom of the valley to
the northward, where there was a small natural meadow, through which
flowed a stream scarcely visible from the valley's rim. This open ground
looked hardly larger than an ordinary door-yard, but was really severa