“Of course you know,” he said in an agreeable voice, “that this is your death-warrant. I wonder at you for such monumental carelessness! Or, perhaps, it wasn’t carelessness.”
“No,” said Stafford, “it wasn’t carelessness. But I am not a spy. Yesterday I escaped from Prison X.”
“Tell that,” said the lieutenant, “to the marines. Sergeant, we move before noon, and jobs of this sort must be put behind us! There’s a drumhead court sitting now. Bring him across.”
The tree was an oak with one great bough stretching like a warped beam across a cart track. Stafford divined it when he and the blue squad were yet three hundred yards away. It topped a slight rise and it thrust that arm out so starkly against the sky. He knew it for what it was. The world and the freshness of the world were as vividly with him as during any hour of the preceding vivid twelve. Every sense was vigorously functioning; the whole range of perception was lit; length and breadth and depth, he felt an intimacy of knowledge, a sure interpenetration. He saw wholly every little dogwood tree, every stalk of the long grass by the roadside; the cadence of the earth was his, and the taste of existence was in his mouth. He had a steady sense of the deep that was flowing into the mould of life and then out of the mould of life. He felt eternal. The tree and that stark limb bred in him no fear.
A party of cavalry came up behind the foot soldiers.
“Where are you going?” asked the officer at the head.
“To hang a spy,” answered the lieutenant. “On the tree yonder.”
“Yes?” said the officer. “Not the pleasantest of work, but at times necessary.—It’s a lovely morning.”
“Isn’t it? The heat’s broken at last.”
The troopers continued to ride alongside, and so all mounted the little rise and came together upon the round of dry sward beneath the tree. A curt order or two left the blue soldiers drawn up at one side of this ring, and the prisoner with the provost guard in the centre, beneath the tree. Stafford glanced down at the rope that was now about his neck. It lay curled there like a tawny serpent, visible, real, real as the bough up to which, too, he glanced—real, and yet profoundly of no tremendous importance. He had a curious fleeting impression as of a fourth dimension, as of the bough above arching a portal, on the other side of which lay utter security. Upon the way thither he had been perfectly silent, and he felt no inclination now toward speech or any demonstration. He stood and waited, and he was not conscious of either quickening or retarding in Time’s quiet footfall.