Old lady Knouse, the eternal Knouse on her front porch, asking questions, wanting to know things she knew already. “What went with those soldiers, Daniel?”

“They’re up on the hill.”

“Maybe more will come,” she nodded.

“Doubtless we’ll get our share,” he told her, and she scuttled back into her house. He thought it odd that she should have a bread-knife in her hand.

He could hear a faint but persistent cheering in the village. The Union troops were being welcomed as saviors, as protectors who came from the President himself to right whatever wrongs the rebels had visited upon these innocent people. Bale wondered what would happen to the stragglers whom the old cobbler-constable had seized on Friday night … they would be taken to a prison camp, probably. This was a strange occupation for men with minds: tag and tag again; you are tapped by a hand, you are dead; another person is tapped, and he is wounded; the prisoners are tapped and tagged and led away.

He walked out into the road. Most of the cavalry squad had vanished over the hill, but two men still waited at the summit, dismounted, with horses standing beside them.

From behind, down past Stevens Run, rose the rapping of hoofs … Stevens Run … Thaddeus Stevens was far away from his town, now, and Dan thought how surprised he would be if he knew that soldiers were trampling past his home. Some day Thaddeus Stevens might be even more famous, and people would hear the name of Gettysburg because he had lived there … A single rider swung around the curve; the earth exploded in loose puffs as each hoof touched the ground. Still at that easy gallop, the man passed. He was an officer; he had a dusty mask for a face, and his tight jacket was drenched with sweat. He glared hawk-like at Bale as he churned by. More hoofs, back in the town, an increasing rumble and hullabloo, and more troops coming. The head of a long column bulged around the turn.

The oncoming troops did not lope with the free menace of the rebels; they were uniformed more consistently, they held together in a firm double-file and bright guidons snapped, tiny triangles above their heads. White haze boiled high. You knew that they had ridden endless roads, had drawn their dark blue lines up and down map after map, with inexhaustible gallons of the same blue ink behind them … Closer. They began to be men, even in the heat: individual bodies had been the raw material of which this military mechanism was constructed. They possessed mustaches and legs and stomachs, and one had come from a cow barn and one from a glass factory, but now they were of a tested standard.