Even as Bale turned to look at the long row of parked wagons, one of the vehicles wrenched out of line and went jolting across the uneven ground toward the Fairfield road. Then the third, then another much farther along the wooden rank. The butchered air seemed to crack with the sound of their wheels, the sudden snarls of drivers, and all the slapping of dead leather on living hide. They looked like dirty gray chickens, chickens with cumbersome wheels instead of legs, staggering away from a shelter once friendly but now approached by the menace of a hawk. Underneath their pressure dry branches snapped on the ground, and uniformed men and men in black aprons went scuttling out of their path. In the country west of the ridge, far down near Willoughby Run, the spatter of carbines grew more distinct. Take care, a cursing quartette burst out, where the devil ye’re … a wagon swayed to one side, turned left and went over with a resounding smash against a farrier’s cart. One of the horses was down. Through the dust and the spasm of kicking legs, men came tumbling to cut the tangled harness.

Northwest, where the new railroad grade cleaved the ridge, more bugles were signalling a repeated message. The steady fall of horses’ hoofs, trained creatures, a mechanized fragment of this remarkable horde: they were thundering up the Pike, a gun which had been left behind in the village and only now was rocking out to join the trumpets which yelled for it. Twenty-four bony legs tearing into the dust, teams swam high above the road, and riders on three of the horses were strapping savagely. The tawny metal tube bounded from side to side behind them. Why, Dan said aloud and to the strange silence which clothed the empty yard—that general was a prophet, all the time he drank his coffee. He said this would happen. Come a-booming when they come—

Maybe this frantic little cannon was part of the supports which he had mentioned … A single horse skimmed up out of the railroad cut and across the field toward the Pike. Its rider threw himself to the ground as the animal halted, sliding broadside by the high north fence. He flung against the rails; one went down, another, another—Dan could hear them thumping and rolling. The horses and the brass gun roared past, lathered in grit, red-striped clowns clinging desperately to the cubed gun carriage. The man at the fence mouthed: “Calif’s straight ahead on this road!” His scream cut itself short; the churning dust wiped across in front of him; the gun went bounding up the slope, horses and limber and all, and when the haze had drifted low Dan could see that the man was once more mounted—he was past the breach he had made in the fence, and pounding toward Stevens Run in a new storm of his own making.