She said, “Yes, yes! Any moment. We know … I thought the team was running away.”

“Where is mother?”

“Upstairs.” She tried to say, “Turpentine. She’s taking—” It was the first time she had ever seen Mr. Fanning when he looked untidy, with his waistcoat hanging open and soiled cuffs far down over his hands.

“This bag,” he muttered. “It’s from the factory. Papers and letters—my contracts—I have currency from the safe, more than seven hundred dollars, part gold. We must—”

She nodded. “Give it to me. I will hide it.”

He took a deep breath, then pressed the handle decisively within her grasp. He limped on into the hall, and she could see his white, delicate hand trembling as he rested it on the newel-post. “Mother,” he called, “I’m coming—” and went up the stairs as rapidly as he could go.

A sound was driving itself against the girl’s ears. As she looked across the mound of shrubbery beside the porch, she was positive that the poplar trees shimmered, the fences were blurry and titillating, all uprooted and quivered by the pulsation of the long ridge. Wagons and men, whip-snappings, some kind of struggling outcry and chatter, all minced by the stupendous turning of wheels … wagons with sick men, wagons full of sacked grain and gunpowder and corned-beef, an awful migration pushing its sound ahead.

This could not be the invading army so soon, so soon. “Why,” she thought daintily, “they haven’t given us time!” The bag of papers and money weighed against her leg; she imagined that she had Mr. Fanning’s whole factory, his past and present life and a good share of his future, all his assured comfort, there it was in her hand ready to be hidden. The barn. No, invading armies burned barns and haystacks. The house … Tyler had told her what happened to house after house in Virginia. Down in the ground, deep under a blanket of beetles and white roots, that was the place for burying.

There was an abandoned well beneath a Baldwin tree, just across the driveway. Once, said Mrs. Fanning, it had been covered by a wooden platform, and Tyler had barely missed going to his death when the rotten planks gave way. Now the hollow menace was covered by two limestone slabs; quack-grass wove a skein around them.