“I know all that,” she said, drearily. “There are more troops over there in the road. Past the Bale house. I’m—” she began to mumble, and she did not care whether he heard the words or not—“I am going over there and—ask Mr. Bale what to do, about the horses. Maybe we can get them back. Maybe he—” She reached the fence, bent her steel-skirt around her knees, and began to slide between the rails. My child he kept calling, come back at once! She began to run, the rough green weeds slashing at her clothes. At that moment she did not care how much her father-in-law was outraged by her brazen going-away. This car of war had come pushing through the hills, as in her nightmare thoughts: it was here, trundling down the Chambersburg Pike, and she had best see it as it came. She could not slump in a hot room which smelled of turpentine, and pray and sigh with aliens. Dan, she thought: I must be with him. I would rather be at his side.

She looked back when she was nearly across the field, and she could see Mr. Fanning standing out on the kitchen stoop, waving his arms at her. Gone crazy, she said. He is sure that I’ve become mad. And I have become mad, but not on this day … in this same field, and long ago, days and days and days.

Two shabby, dark-eyed men were drinking water at the Bale well. Muddy haversacks and rolls of ragged blankets lay on the step behind them: they wore their muskets slung, and the damp barrels gleamed softly … They moved back from the well, forcing a somber, steady gaze at Irene as she hurried past. “Brothers,” she said to herself. “They look so very much alike. They look like pictures of Israelites in the wilderness. John the Baptist … some queer, unhappy prophets who carry guns as they go out to spread a peculiar gospel. But like enough they are cut-throats.” Then Dan Bale was beside her, and he had caught her hands.

He said, “I’m glad you came,” and she nodded politely, as if this were a party, a lawn social where her presence was expected and desired. He released her hands: the rebels might see. Twenty feet away, beyond the ivory fence, the army moved in front of them. “Here’s more cavalry,” the man said in a matter-of-fact tone. “White’s cavalry, those men told me. Some more passed a few minutes ago.”

They were boys, but no boys like those who had gone up the road that same day. They cantered carelessly, wild hunters released from a dun frieze which hung all along the rainy Pike. They owned flapping hats of shapeless felt, drawn low over their eyes; their yellow faces were pinched and flat as the profiles on greasy coins.