With the morning, he thought, little boys would come splashing down York street. They’d appear not as they did ordinarily, after a rain—to squash the puddles of mud about, to work up mud puddings at every little bog—but to search for the dismantled droppings of the soldiers. Things would lie scattered among the ruts which marred the tenderest portions of the Pike: wads of chewed tobacco, torn straps, ears of corn, a ragged pair of drawers, and a scrap of money printed in Richmond. And always and always would be the apples of manure, high-piled, low-piled, sown freely—soft, hard, tan, greenish, yellow—long windrows of hasty excretion, the last record of an army which hurried as its beasts emptied themselves.

Men stood in groups on the porch of the Emblem Hotel, though only a few lights shone in the stores. There was a gobble of voices mingled with the hollow dripping of wooden eaves … “and put all the women-folks and children in the Presbyterian church or somewheres, and get what guns we can together” … “saw more soldiers already on the road from Mummasburg, and cannons by them” … they jabbered boldly, now that the gray men were gone to York. Dan passed the porch railing, a yard from the nearest group. Someone grunted, “Who is that?” and the chatter dulled down for a moment. A low voice muttered, “Any Copperhead could let ’em come in his yard and get a drink.” Bale turned, and came up the steps. Sides of faces, whiskered profiles showing brown in the glow of hotel lamps. “Who said that?” he asked.

Nobody answered, but they were all looking at him. A one-legged shape clicked across from the doorway, balancing on a crutch. “Don’t you mind that, Bale,” Bart McKosh said. “Fannings’ nigger just told me how you got Huddlestone and Tom Fisher away. If I had two good legs I’d kick the poop out of anybody says you’re a Copperhead.”

“I’d rather do it myself,” Dan replied. “Thank you, anyway.” He went down the steps and on around the edge of the Diamond.

A few doors west of the square, and on the south side of Chambersburg street, was a black vacancy between two buildings. Dan remembered it as a torment of his childhood, when first he was old enough to come home alone at night. Daytimes the cavity was innocent enough: a narrow waste where grass grew tall, where rubble coasted slowly into a weedy excavation which once had been a cellar. At night, and to a frightened boy, the ten-yard gap was charged with evil; no goblins but gibbered there, spitting their decayed breath in your face no matter how fast you ran … And now the phantasmagoria had come once more. They twitched forward through the rain, and one of them was an old man who carried a lantern in his hand.