Feebly, he tried to throw his discarded jacket across the intervening space. Dan picked it up, and went to the corpse. “Martin’s gone to pick him some Butternuts. It’s a mercy—he’ll shoot the gravy out of any that gets in his way…” He coughed some blood and saliva into his beard. “I know them boys well; they come from Indiana, same as me. That’s kind of you, fellow, to cover up a poor fellow that way who can’t help himself. How’d you like to be et by flies? No more would I.”

Oh, Dan wanted to say, shut your gossiping mouth. Guns still built their prodigious mountain of smoke above the ridge, driving a spiteful punctuation into that approaching scream. A muted thudding passed close at hand; one of Buford’s officers fled through the orchard, and out over the pasture. He cut across the Fairfield road and went rocking on past the extension of Middle street. Oh, Marthy, said the Indiana trooper, and groaned seriously. A fat man in a silk hat came clambering over the fence behind the Bale house. He looked sullen and dogged in his isolation, and a brown satchel dangled from his hand. Dan ran toward him, motioning him back. “Doc!” he yelled.

Duffey waved, but did not pause in his lumbering scramble up the briary incline. Whole sections of the seminary fence lay flat; he floundered across the loose rails, and his face was reddish purple. He began, “Now, never be minding any discussion. I wasn’t stopping any of those men on the road—they’re able enough, if they can get away so neat. I thought I’d be up and visit the invalids.”

“You’d better get out of here,” Bale said. “They’ve ordered me away.”

The doctor licked his lips. “This won’t be as dangerous as the cholera. You should have seen it in Philadelphia—folks dying like flies, and you never knew when it would be biting you.” His webbed eyelids rolled up, and he cocked his head toward the man who sat propped against the tree. “There’s one bad hit, I judge. Come along.”

They stopped beside the man from Indiana. “What have you been letting them do to you, friend?” Duffey went down on his knees, sighing.

The soldier clutched the old man’s sleeve with a greedy grasp. “Do something fer me,” he gasped. “I got a ball in my body—”