Ty sighed, “You oughtn’t to crowd in on them in that dinky little rig of theirs … my stomach feels like the devil.”

This time he shut his eyes for good. Presently he was snoring.

He slept all through their brief stop at Hanover City. The train champed away, northwest now. There were tiny, square ventilating holes cut in the bulbous bellies of the swaying lamps. Angular patches of yellowness—neither light nor shadow, but seeming to smell of hot oil—jerked and swung across the heads of the passengers. The laboring engine drew its strength from blood-vessels and narrow lungs stretched beneath those coaches; you felt the spongy tissues quiver and hiss and give up their all. The whistle made piping and wolfish sounds, the bell clanked despairingly.

They stopped, and someone was knocking upon a wheel with a little hammer. Through the open window, soft soot wallowed in; Bale gazed out past a signal light which seemed nailed against the silver trunk of a beech tree. There were no beech trees, out west … a horse’s hoofs went kock, kock, kock in the muffled dust of a nearby road.

A thin man in a checkered coat came swiftly through the car. He stood upon the rear platform and waved a lantern and called hoarsely, “Now, Henry. Now comes it!” The engine leaped, trying to break the cars in two. H’la, h’la, h’la … and give that baby something to eat, so it won’t howl any more. And everybody seems to be asleep, with the wheels chewing and chewing and chewing as the yellow squares quiver and dance.

Brakes began to screw tight, bringing a sooty world to life. “Gettysburg,” summoned the gaunt Dutchman. “All is out for Gettysburg.”

Chapter 2

2.

The double doors into the parlor had been closed, and when they were pushed aside with much squeaking and crunching, Bale could see that his grandfather had a damp napkin spread across his face. There were two candles on the mantel-shelf, and guttering group in the candelabra which stood on the Drum table. With liquid affluence, tiny tongues of yellow kept washing over the black panels.

Old Mrs. Wurke whispered, “The coffin from Mr. Sketchley comes. He helped us lay him out.”

A wad of short-stemmed red roses had been crammed into a gilt-and-blue jardiniere on the floor beside the coffin. Mrs. Wurke’s slipper made a soft, ringing sound against the jardiniere as she scraped past. She peeled back the damp white cloth from the dead face. Pentland Bale looked sick and disgusted and made of paraffin. Already his jaw had sagged, and the hands of the willing undertakers had not been skillful enough to draw the wrinkled lip fully over his yellow incisors. A faint, sick-room putridity mingled with the smell of crushed roses.