Амброз Бирс - The Affair at Coulter's

During supper that evening an orderly of the escort showed himself into the dining-room, and asked permission to speak to the colonel.

“What is it, Barbour?” said that officer pleasantly, having overheard the request.

“Colonel, there is something wrong in the cellar; I don’t know what—somebody there. I was down there rummaging about.”

“I will go down and see,” said a staff officer, rising.

“So will I,” the colonel said; “let the others remain. Lead on orderly.”

They took a candle from the table and descended the cellar stairs, the orderly in visible trepidation. The candle made but a feeble light, but presently, as they advanced, its narrow circle of illumination revealed a human figure seated on the ground against the black stone wall which they were skirting, its knees elevated, its head bowed sharply forward. The face, which should have been seen in profile, was invisible, for the man was bent so far forward that his long hair concealed it; and, strange to relate, the beard, of a much darker hue, fell in a great tangled mass and lay along the ground at his feet. They involuntarily paused; then the colonel, taking the candle from the orderly’s shaking hand, approached the man and attentively considered him. The long dark beard was the hair of a woman—dead. The dead woman clasped in her arms a dead babe. Both were clasped in the arms of the man, pressed against his breast, against his lips. There was blood in the hair of the woman; there was blood in the hair of the man. A yard away lay an infant’s foot. It was near an irregular depression in the beaten earth which formed the cellar’s floor—a fresh excavation with a convex bit of iron, having jagged edges, visible in one of the sides. The colonel held the light as high as he could. The floor of the room above was broken through, the splinters pointing at all angles downward. “This casemate is not bomb-proof,” said the colonel gravely; it did not occur to him that his summing up of the matter had any levity in it.

They stood about the group awhile in silence; the staff officer was thinking of his unfinished supper, the orderly of what might possibly be in one of the casks on the other side of the cellar. Suddenly the man, whom they had thought dead, raised his head and gazed tranquilly into their faces. His complexion was coal black; the cheeks were apparently tattooed in irregular sinuous lines from the eyes downward. The lips, too, were white, like those of a stage negro. There was blood upon his forehead.

The staff officer drew back a pace, the orderly two paces.

“What are you doing here, my man?” said the colonel, unmoved.

“This house belongs to me, sir,” was the reply, civilly delivered.

“To you? Ah, I see! And these?”

“My wife and child. I am Captain Coulter.”