The night-barking dog on McPherson’s ridge was making no sound; perhaps he had been housed and muzzled against the fear of a raiding enemy. Now Dan could realize the pervasive menace back of the leafy hills. The few stars looked flat and swaddled by wet clouds, and the moon was only a vague sickle beneath them. Somewhere at the end of this road were other men with muskets; no one would have to direct their armament … Silently, he went into his brooding house. He felt oppressed by monstrous desolation.

The Fanning place showed no gleam of light; it might have been swallowed in a thousand miles of steppes. And nineteen hours before, Bale and the woman had agreed that they would not be together this night … He sat on the couch in the black living room. In that space, their wrapped bodies had lain. He felt the inevitable, prickling surge of remembrance … her hair in his mouth, the smell of her clothes. His throat made a rough sound.

After he had gone to bed, his nervous brain kept leaping about, centering on Elijah in broad chevrons, Elijah with a pancake cap, frightened school-boys trying to stack arms, a captain who limped with the pain of raw leg muscles. He dreamed: Lucas Mite walked through the dry prairie grass of autumn, through deep blue-stem, with a gun in his hands. Dan could see Mite’s face as clearly as he had ever seen it: rusty beard, the big-pored nostrils, the sad gray eyes so level and cool. Mite was hunting for prairie chickens, the birds cheeped about in dry tangles underfoot, you could never find them … Lower, he bent, lower—pointing his shotgun this way and that. Then, without one shiver of warning, a wall of spectral cripples in new uniforms had risen up all around him. They opened their mouths; they said nothing; they blinked blind, white eyes … And from this dream, half roused by the wailing cry he made and coasting into deep forgetfulness again, Dan did not awake until the next day.

The sky was bulging with gray clouds. Children’s voices soared with the common shrilling of startled poultry, but beyond their murmur was the dull, earthy march of men who walked together. Startled, Bale leaped out of bed and to the window. Through the motionless elms he could see a broad, purplish tide coming up the road; splotches of faces above the deep color, mingling, bobbing, row after row.