They moved that way into the night, the girl leading him through fields as he struggled to find his own balance and when that would not happen finally let himself move along with her as with a current. She led him down through a woods of old oaks and into a narrow ravine with a small stream and he guessed this was where she had carried his water from. In the dark she brought him to a hidden dugout shored with logs and shielded with a thicket of rhododendron, the open front of the dugout half covered by a hand-laid drywall of stone, old enough so the surfaces of the stones were soft with moss. Inside she made a fire with flint and steel, and in the light they ate the rest of her ham and she brought more water up from the stream. She kept the fire small but with the food it warmed them. She asked where he was from and he told her and she asked where that was and he said up by Canada and she knew where that was. He asked where she was from and she thought about it and then said, “Round here.” He didn’t know if she was lying or telling the truth and knew it wasn’t his business to probe. She had every reason not to trust him and he realized how exceptional her care of him was, how great her risk had been and in her eyes still likely was. He sat with her in the cave, built he guessed by her own kind. Word of this place and others like it passed along a vein of trust, a line of knowledge outside the reach of his own race, and he looked at her, feeling he was beginning to know her. The idea of sex bloomed in his mind and he moved a little away from her and took up one of the two blankets, leaving the most room he could for her by the fire and told her, “You’ve been awful helpful. I just want to tell you that. Dawn tomorrow I’ll get out of your hair and get on and find my regiment. They’ll probably go ahead and shoot me for deserting anyway.” And seeing her eyes flare at this he said, “That’s a joke. I bet they think I’m dead. Probably think I’m a ghost when they see me.”

She made a face at him that was not quite a smile. “You’re not any ghost.”

He grinned at her. “Not yet anyhow.”

“Some strange kind of man, that’s what you are.”

“What’re you talking about?”

She shook her head and said, “Scuse me.” Her tone sudden with spleen she stepped around him, ducking low until she was outside, and he lay and watched her disappear in the darkness. When she came back she was silent and so was he. Something had been extended from both of them, some straw bridge from one to the other, but then it had fallen apart and not either of them knowing what made it fall but both knowing it was gone. As children both feeling the fault and afraid to admit it. So they said nothing.