He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of incredible joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs fowards with extended arms. He feels her arounds around him and smells the huckleberries off her hair, he was home, he had made it somehow, if the war would continue that was not his business anymore, he had made it somehow, alive, and he wasn't going back to that hell.
The rope must have broken somehow-he told her-because the last thing I remember was falling of that bridge over Owl Creek.
