The woman ran across the driveway and knelt beside the stones. The damp stain of grass was pushed through dimity and muslin and silk, printed on her knee as she rested there. She clawed a sodden corner of ancient wood from beneath the left-hand slab and forced the flat bag through the opening. A little chorus of gravel and the dust of rotten wood went trickling down into mysterious water far below. With numb hands she wrenched off the wide sash around her waist and tied it to the handle of the carpet-bag. Half-hitch, half-hitch, half-hitch; it was the only knot she knew. She fastened an end of the sash to the wormy corner of hewn plank, and forced it back into place … Wet grass rubbed and gritted between her fingers as she tore up handfuls of it and strewed them around the corner of the well. Before this, she had removed the bandage from her arm—that long wound which the Fannings knew as caused by a jagged splinter in her closet—but it seemed that she was courting suppuration, rubbing pollution after pollution into the encrusted scar.

At last she stood up, her gown all stained, and she looked at the well. “It’s safe,” she said, half aloud, “if they don’t become suspicious and begin to pry around. And if the planks don’t give way—” Past the barnyard, down the sloping road in front of Bales’ and Knouses’, moved a thickening tide of men. Some have horses, Irene said to herself, and some have none. Long poles thrust up, muffled and wound with dun rags. I suppose those are their banners—covered because it’s rainy. Tyler calls them “colors cased.” Some have horses, some have none.

She mumbled it over, again, again, as she moved up the driveway. It was like a counting-out game which she had played long before. How long? Fifteen years? Oh, the war had been a war for all of fifteen years … William-Trimmity-is-a-good-water-man-catches-hens-puts-them-in-pens-some-lay-eggs-and-some-lay-none-White-Foot-Speckle-Foot-oh-be-gone-and-O-U-T-spells-out-some-have-horses-some-have-none … She heard Mr. Fanning cough, up in the open window; he stood there staring at her and jerking his whiskers. “It’s hid,” she called. He murmured inanely. “What? What’s hid … oh, yes—”

“It’s hid in the old well. I tied it to my sash and let it down.”

“They will see the sash, I fear.”

“No, I covered it with grass and—and things … Look!” she cried, “Past the barn—they—”

He turned away. “Mother,” he said, and his voice seemed humble and fumbling, “mother, here are the rebels. You can see them … I was assured that there would be no invasion. I told Tyler, in all confidence—” Then Mrs. Fanning was at the window beside him.

His words, falling limply. “What did—Demon do with the team?”

“He took them into the barn.”