“You always were a queer duck, Bale,” smiled Fanning. His pale eyes were narrow and expressionless … yes, he’s the soldier, he is it, this is the right thing for him to do, he is suitable clay for them to shape and, Almighty God, how they have shaped him!

This talk, Bale told himself savagely, has brought it on. Why did I have to sit down beside this man?

In the back of his brain, far beneath an aching area of his skull, some brown, niggerish creatures in feathers and loose cotton shirts and ragged blankets, crawled and peeked beyond a woodpile. He heard their squawl go gibbering over the world. Lucas Mite dragged his Sharp’s rifle across the molasses barrel. Behind him, a dry voice whispered, “I can’t git that one.” Molasses dripped and burbled from the perforated barrels … and remember how we found those Gardener kids—they had taken them by their heels and swung them—

But they were only animals, he insisted. They were not men. They wore trousers, some of them, and months before they had squatted in front of people’s doors, whining for Little Tea, Little Sugee, Little Whisk. Some of them wore clothes, but they were not men. That was not a war. It was shooting at wolves, at snakes, at enormous ghosts who gobbled in the cold daylight … Must keep insisting …

He said to Ty Fanning, “Tell me about Doctor Duffey. He was the one who wrote me about my grandfather, but I’ve been wondering how he’s keeping himself.”

“Didn’t you see the Missis? She’s aboard this carriage. I saw her get on, at the Junction. There she is—right ahead. Mrs. Duffey.”

Bale stood up. He moved down the littered aisle toward a leghorn hat with painted wooden strawberries dangling from its crown, a hat which roosted cozily above the seat, with an enormous gray bonnet as its neighbor. “Mrs. Duffey,” he said. The gray bonnet came up like an opening trap: it showed the face caught inside—a pock-marked woman’s face with sallow skin and bright hazel eyes. Mrs. Duffey’s thin fingers had escaped through holes in her black silk mitts, and held a stiff bouquet of wooden knitting needles. She cried, “Great heavens to Betsy. Dan Bale!”

“I’ve been sitting back there with Tyler Fanning. He just now told me that you were on the train.”

She squealed softly; the mass of brown yarn sank deep into the hollow between her thin knees; she snatched at his hands and squeezed them. “You gave me a start. We were looking for you, but not so quick.”

“Then Grandfather isn’t—?”