Character guide

Peyton Farquhar

major

Also known as Farquhar, II Peyton Farquhar

Farquhar is a wealthy secessionist whose imperious circumstances kept him out of the Confederate army, leaving him chafing for distinction on his own plantation. When a gray-clad rider shares news of Owl Creek bridge and its lone sentinel, Farquhar's eagerness to serve the South overrides his caution. His fatal willingness to treat war as an adventure for gentlemen is the engine of the story's central ordeal.

Jerome Searing

major

Also known as Private Searing, Searing, Jerome Searing, the Missing Jerome Searing

Searing is a reconnaissance man whose mission collapses when a splintered post leaves him wedged in debris, only his right arm partly free. He hears a voice tell him he is caught like a rat in a trap, yet his first instinct is not panic but reconnaissance and defense. His cold, methodical mind under impossible constraint makes him the story's study in trapped consciousness and soldierly will.

Carter Druse

major

Also known as Druse, Private Carter Druse

Druse lies hidden above a valley, watching a stately rider who is both an enemy and his father, recalling the parting command to do what he conceives to be his duty. He trembles, nearly swoons, then steadies himself and fires, first at the horse, then at the man. His private war between filial love and military obligation gives the story its unbearable moral center.

Parker Adderson

major

Also known as Adderson, Sergeant Parker Adderson

Adderson is a sergeant caught in enemy uniform, brought before a Confederate general for what amounts to a capital trial in a candlelit tent. He answers questions with dry wit, concedes he is a spy, and treats his own execution as one of the profession's nice observances. His unflinching composure in the face of certain death makes him the story's unsettling mirror for the men who will kill him.

Captain Downing Madwell

major

Also known as Captain Madwell, Madwell

Madwell is a daring, honorable captain whose closest friend, Sergeant Caffal Halcrow, lies mutilated and screaming in a ravine after a disastrous charge. The major, Halcrow's brother, is Madwell's bitter enemy, and the regiment has already fallen back miles away. Madwell's terrible choice at the dying man's side turns battlefield loyalty into an act of unbearable intimacy.

Herman Brayle

major

Also known as Lieutenant Herman Brayle, Lieutenant Brayle, Brayle

Brayle is the general's newest aide, a scholar and gentleman whose conspicuous uniform and reckless gallantry make him a spectacle wherever he goes. Ordered to carry a message the long way, he instead canters into the enemy's field of fire, drawing both armies' attention and a storm of bullets. His vanity and his courage are indistinguishable, and the narrator's grief over him becomes the story's reckoning with what such bravery costs.

Murlock

major

A young homesteader who nurses his fever-stricken wife to her death, then keeps a nightlong vigil beside her body in a lonely cabin.

Harker Brayton

major

Also known as Brayton

A wealthy, idle bachelor-scholar, fresh from remote travels, who wakes in a friend's eccentric San Francisco house to find a serpent coiled beneath his bed.

Jefferson Doman

major

Also known as Mr. Jefferson Doman, Mr. Doman, Doman

A destitute old man shuffling through winter snow toward the Home for Old Men, carrying a past that will not stay buried.

Mr. Jarette

major

Also known as Jarette, candle Mr. Jarette

A rational man who locks himself into a room with a corpse to test a theory, and finds his own nerves the harder puzzle.

Captain Ransome

supporting

Also known as Ransome

A Union battery commander whose order to open fire becomes the axis of a court of inquiry he cannot argue his way out of.

William Grayrock

supporting

Also known as Private Grayrock, Grayrock, William

A young soldier praised for courage he never showed, who slips past the pickets to find the man he may or may not have shot.

Captain Graffenreid

supporting

Graffenreid commands a company in the front rank of a vast army drawn up in perfect, silent formation, an unobstructed half-mile of peaceful-looking ground between him and the enemy's wood. The stillness is the trial: he has an officer's duty to appear fearless before his men, yet the coming violence presses on him with a dread he cannot show. His ordeal distills what the war does to a man who must be brave on schedule, and it anchors the collection's recurring question of what courage actually costs.

Gilson

supporting

Also known as Mr. Gilson, the dead Gilson, the late Mr. Gilson, Milton Gilson

Milton Gilson leaves behind a will that turns a whole region into a battlefield of lawyers, false witnesses, and inflamed opinion, reaching into press, pulpit, and street corner. His monument on Mammon Hill stands as a pompous rebuke to the 'viper brood' of heirs until a flooded creek topples it and exposes the decayed coffin beneath. Even in death he drives the story's central spectacle of greed and small-town corruption, and his exhumed grave becomes the image of what his fortune has done to everyone still living.

Jack Raynor

supporting

Also known as Raynor, Jack

Raynor moves easily among the fashionable set, carrying news and judgments from one drawing-room to the next, and his reports on the mysterious Dr. Barritz both fascinate and unsettle the young woman writing her diary. He is likable and dangerous at once, a man who 'observes no game laws' and exterminates reputations without pausing for breath, yet he and the narrator share a genuine old friendship from their Redhorse days. His gossip shapes how the diarist sees Barritz, making him a quiet engine of the story's romantic and social tension.

John Hardshaw

supporting

Also known as John, Hardshaw

Hardshaw arrives at the Home's gate in midwinter, ill-clad but with a strange fitness and good taste about him, and deliberately avoids the bright lamp over the main door in favor of a dimmer side entrance. The superintendent, Mr. Tilbody, regards every new inmate as a personal insult, and the institution itself treats poverty as a qualification rather than a misfortune. Hardshaw's quiet, evasive approach to the place signals that his need is not simply for shelter, and his arrival opens the story's examination of charity, shame, and what the old are made to pay for their keep.

Richard Benning

supporting

Benning undertakes the reconnaissance that no skirmish line could survive, riding out in full view of thousands of hardened soldiers who watch him in suspended, almost religious silence. He is not a bravado performer but a deliberate sacrifice, choosing to either return unharmed or be shot before the army's eyes so that the question of the enemy's position can be answered. His ride becomes the collection's most concentrated image of courage and devotion, and the watchers' stillness measures how much one man's act can mean to an army.

Mrs. Hardshaw

supporting

Also known as Hardshaw

She shares the dangers and privations of frontier life with a willing spirit, and when fever takes her there is no physician within miles and no neighbor to summon. Her husband Murlock nurses her for three days, then prepares her body mechanically, unable to weep and unable to accept that she is truly dead. Her death, and the strange events that follow in the cabin, drive the story's meditation on grief as an artist with many instruments, and her memory chains Murlock to a life he might otherwise have abandoned.

Silas Tilbody

supporting

Also known as Mr. Silas Tilbody, Mr. Tilbody, the great Mr. Tilbody

Tilbody runs the Home for Old Men with the aggrieved efficiency of a man who believes the founder's benevolence was sadly impaired by providing any inmates at all. In his private castle-in-Spain, the residents would be sleek, paying, and civil; in reality they are querulous, ungrateful, and perpetually replacing one another. His petty tyranny over the poor and old sets the moral weather of the story's opening, where charity and resentment share the same roof.

Dr. Helberson

supporting

Also known as Helberson

Helberson let a colleague's contemptuous manner goad him into a wager he already regrets, and the regret sharpens every hour he waits for it to resolve. He is the moral center of the group precisely because he alone feels the weight of what they have done, confessing to Harper that if anything happens they are ruined, as he fears they deserve to be. When the crisis breaks, he does not flee with the others; he identifies himself as a physician and walks toward the need.

William Mancher

supporting

Also known as Mancher, Dr. Mancher

Mancher agreed to be the "subject" in a wager testing whether a man could endure hours alone with a dead body, and his willingness to rise from the dead and explain matters is the only escape hatch Helberson and Harper can imagine. But Helberson's warning—that if Mancher has had to resurrect himself he had better have been discreet—hangs over the whole scheme. His promise, and whether he keeps it cleanly, is the hinge on which the story's mounting disaster turns.

Irene Marlowe

supporting

Also known as Irene

Irene has made a cheerful home of her awful isolation, finding sufficiency in light chores, her child, her husband, and a few foolish books. When she begs Marlowe not to hunt because of a dreadful dream she cannot fully recall, he laughs, and she yields because she lacks the gift of humor to hold out against his kindly badinage. Her dream—a second cradle, a dead father, barred windows, a child's face that is a wild animal's—is the story's dark prophecy, and her long night of waiting is the vigil the reader keeps with her.

Charles Marlowe

supporting

Also known as Marlowe

Marlowe is at ease in his forest life, taking down his rifle when there is already meat enough because the day invites it. He receives his wife's solemn warning about a dream with less gravity than it deserves—he laughs, teases her about Baby losing the power of speech, and leaves with a kiss for each. His cheerful disbelief in her premonition is the ordinary human error the story will punish, and his failure to return at nightfall is the silence around which the rest of the tale tightens.

Eva Maynard

supporting

Also known as Eva

Eva's voice—angry, impetuous, unmistakably a lady's—rises through the twilight against a man's rich, musical tones that promise she and another will suffer if she does not let things remain as they are. The eavesdropper sees her sink to her knees in supplication before the figures vanish like an uncertain element leavened into unreality. When she appears at the Brownville House breakfast the next morning, the ordinary setting collides with the menace of the night before, and the reader is left to decide which scene was real.

Mary Matthews Porfer

supporting

Also known as Mary Matthews

A jeweled hand reaches into a dead man's coat and draws out a mouldy pocketbook — Mary Matthews Porfer, whose beauty and ruin are equally documented.

Captain Armisted

supporting

Also known as Armisted

A dark, saturnine Confederate officer with a bloodied handkerchief bound about his brow, he speaks the words that sink another man's world away from his feet.

Mr. Porfer

supporting

An ill-clad old man shuffling through winter snow toward the Home for Old Men, his rags the uniform of an army of indigence.

Mrs. Porfer

supporting

A woman whose jeweled hand and ghastly white face — traversed by a deforming cicatrice no art could hide — mark her as both privileged and cursed.

Barney Bree

supporting

Also known as Mr. Barney Bree, Mr. Bree

A grave digger and whisky-soaked miner whose letter to a friend — 'I've hit her hard in the boneyard' — conceals a fortune and a corpse.

James R. Colston

supporting

Also known as Colston, old Jim, James

An old man in rags, once a slaveholder, now seeking admittance to the Home for Old Men — his past a debt that poverty alone cannot settle.

General Cameron

supporting

Also known as Cameron

He stands facing the distant ridge, field-glass raised, the still center of a battlefield that moves only when he speaks. His few words to an aide set skirmishers in motion and halt them again, but he withholds the order that might spare the rider he plainly knows. Around him hardened man-killers watch with suspended breath, and his refusal to intervene becomes the story's quiet engine of dread.

Captain Hartroy

supporting

Also known as II Captain Hartroy

Hartroy holds a field officer's command in a Cumberland defile, a promotion that still sits uneasily on a man discovered rather than born to rank. When a butternut-clad civilian passes his sentinel with a paper and a faintly ironic 'Gineral,' something in the encounter snaps the captain from stolid duty into pursuit. His conscience, not his orders, drives the chase that follows.

Dramer Brune

supporting

Also known as Brune

Seen indistinctly among trees near the Brownville House, Brune speaks with rich, musical anger to a woman in gray, warning that she is powerless and that both will suffer. His eyes glitter bleakly in the moonlight, and when the hidden observer springs from shadow, the pair simply disappears. He matters because the next morning's new face at the breakfast table makes the reader doubt whether the encounter was real.

General Masterson

supporting

Also known as Introduce General Masterson

Masterson commands from the fringe of the wood, motionless while his staff officers hold their glasses up and the whole line of battle stands caught in a new kind of attention. He knows that sending skirmishers would cost half their lives for the same answer, and he lets the volunteer ride instead. His silence is the story's moral pressure: the price of knowledge, and who is permitted to pay it.

Sergeant Halcrow

supporting

Caffal Halcrow enlisted in Madwell's company simply because separation from his friend was unbearable, and each has since climbed two steps up a ladder that keeps pulling them apart. His brother Creede, the regiment's cynical major, hates Madwell with a natural antipathy that only Caffal's presence restrains. When the company is driven from the ravine, Caffal falls among the missing, and the feud between the two officers finds its terrible occasion.

General Clavering

supporting

Clavering belongs to the same world of moonlit woods and Brownville House intrigue where voices carry threats and figures vanish before they can be named. His authority over subordinates gives him the power to demand proof of loyalty, and the demand itself becomes the story's central pressure. What he asks, and what it costs the man who must answer, shapes the arc from its earliest scenes.

Lieutenant Price

supporting

Price belongs to that unlucky class of subordinate whose conscience outruns his rank: during the engagement he recognized the battery was firing on its own people and urged the commander to cease, only to be insulted and sent back to his post. Summoned before the general, he answers precisely and without malice, refusing to soften what he saw or to claim knowledge of orders he never received. His plain testimony turns a comrade's honor into a matter of life and death, making him the quiet hinge on which the story's moral catastrophe swings.

Mrs. Farquhar

minor

Also known as Farquhar

Peyton Farquhar's devoted wife.

Scarry

minor

Also known as poor Scarry

A soldier who meets a tragic end.

Charles Breede

minor

Also known as the late Charles Breede

A deceased man whose will causes conflict.

Mr. Winters

minor

A man who encounters a strange creature.

Colonel Harmon

minor

Also known as Colonel

A Union colonel who makes a fateful decision.

Mr. Harper

minor

Also known as Harper, Young Harper

A man who encounters a strange phenomenon.

Mr. Barwell

minor

A man who witnesses a strange event.

Dr. Druring

minor

Also known as IV Dr. Druring

A scientist who studies snakes.

Hurdy-Gurdy

minor

Also known as Hurdy

A dog that plays a role in a strange story.

Marsh

minor

A soldier who experiences a strange vision.

Captain Coulter

minor

Also known as Coulter

A Union officer involved in a deadly affair.

Mr. Brentshaw

minor

A man who tells a story about a ghost.

Baby

minor

An infant whose fate is tied to a tragic story.

Caffal Halcrow

minor

Also known as Caffal

A member of the feuding Halcrow family.

Pauline

minor

A woman involved in a love affair.

Jo Bentley

minor

Also known as Mr. Jo, Bentley, Mr. Bentley, Mr. Jo . Bentley

A man who tells a story about a ghostly encounter.

Miss Matthews

minor

A young woman courted by a mysterious suitor.

Halleck

minor

A Union general mentioned in dispatches.

Dr. Harper

minor

Also known as Harper

A physician who treats a mysterious patient.

E. L. G. Steele

minor

Also known as Mr. E. L. G. Steele, Mr. Steele

A publisher mentioned in the preface.

Colonel Ward

minor

Also known as Colonel

A Union colonel who commands a regiment.

Major Creede Halcrow

minor

Also known as Creede Halcrow, Major Halcrow

A Confederate officer from a feuding family.

John K. Smith

minor

Also known as The K.

A man who applies for a mysterious position.

Dr. Barritz

minor

A physician who investigates a supernatural case.

Miss Mendenhall

minor

Also known as Mendenhall

A young woman courted by a mysterious man.

George Thurston

minor

Also known as Thurston

A soldier who dies in a tragic accident.

Miss Maynard

minor

Eva Maynard's sister, a witness to events.

Private Tassman

minor

Also known as Tassman

A soldier who dies in a skirmish.

Lieutenant Thurston

minor

Also known as Thurston

A young officer who dies in battle.

Mr. Benning

minor

Also known as Benning

Richard Benning's relative, involved in the inheritance.