After the Battle of Shiloh a confederate prisoner Peyton Farquhar is taken to Owl Creek Bridge to be hanged for his Southern sympathies. When the trap is sprung his rope breaks and he escapes. He manages to make it home and is almost in the arms of his wife Melissa when his neck snaps suddenly and he dies at the end of the hangman's rope having imagined the entire escape in the seconds before his death.
