Boy and boy again—one with drenched fuzz on his cheeks, one with the hairless face of an Indian girl, long snarls of hair brushing their collars. They had been foaled to the saddles, they would ride in them until they died. And every cavalryman had the dull butt of a carbine thrusting up beside his leg; they were weighted with revolvers, but few of them carried sabers. You could see embossed letters on holster flaps and saddle skirts as the troop jangled past. US … again, US, and the men for whom those leathers had been stamped were trellising Virginia thickets with their bones.

Behind these riders, the soaked macadam was forested with gray men and sloping muskets: they crunched up out of the hollow horizon and streamed down the hill past this gate. They were infantry; they came by fours with a peculiar, swinging stride which was half a run. The western valleys were shaking with wagons. Lone officers drifted beside the column, mounted shepherds: they wore waterproofs, they wore wet yellow jackets or blue Union capes. Their eyes rested momentarily on Bale and the woman with him—flat, pin-pupiled, the eyes of men who had seen altogether too many things, and were concerned with secret contemplations which no one else could ever define. Sorrels, blacks, roans, chestnuts, a very few grays, the horses were painted with clay, and in some strange manner they had all become of the same shape and gait: they held their heads alike.

A rout-step army, the noisy stretch of leather straining from buckle to buckle, loose shoes which rubbed and blistered and made the wearers walk like lame men. Voices above the mutter of their marching. And Extra Billy’s brigade, they got no Pike up that way … town is this? It’s Gettessbug. Says they got them a shoe factory; place wheh they make shoes … stole them eggs at all. The lady made us a giff.

A young boy’s chant, the key-bugle voice of one who had been a sophomoric orator at some drowsy academy: Backward, turn backward, O Time in yo’ flight, make me a child again just fo’ tonight. There was a rattle of laughter. Yeh, someone called, and a gal child at that—

“They took Becky and Bright,” Irene whispered.

He said, “They rode out of the gate below Mrs. Knouse’s, a minute ago … I went out in the back yard when they first came by, but I could see Demon opening the stable door, and I knew that Mr. Fanning was home. Why did you come over here?”

She looked down at her knotted fingers. “Everything—went to pieces suddenly. I hid—” she lowered her tone—“I hid a bag for Mr. Fanning, and the next minute those men were in the yard. It seemed the natural thing for me to do, in some way—come over here, and stand beside you, and watch—”