Irene said that nothing would hurt her. It was safe enough to go into the kitchen and dip fresh water from the pail, and bring down anything else which was needed. No, no, she would go alone; perhaps Cybo was at the rear door, whining to come in; perhaps that was the little agony they heard … She went up at twelve-thirty, for all their wailing and protests, and she found that no bullets had entered the kitchen. The rooms were stuffy and stale from the torrid glare outside. She crept into the sitting room, then to the library. Through the hot window glass she could see whole colleges of men tramping up the Emmetsburg road—why, she thought, it must be the entire Union army; there could never be more than that; they are blue and black and alive with metal. They drift aside in sturdy little streams, and then bulge together again, and I was right when I thought of ants.

Tyler would be there. She wanted to call down through the beamed flooring: “You are wrong. Your prayers are not worth the saying! He is here—the whole army is here, and this must be the battle in which he will be killed.” Her hands pained her … she looked down and opened them and saw four sore, ruddy dents in each palm.

There was order in this approach, she knew, but she could not identify it. Rapidly the uneven avalanche rolled toward the village; they came like molasses spilling over a platter. There might be that many people in Philadelphia … she whispered aloud. “Where on earth did they all come from?” The house twitched on its foundations; it was ill or intoxicated, it would never be a healthy house again.

Niedes’—they were in the Niedes’ grain. Dust came decently and smothered the Niede farm and every little cluster of trees beyond; the dust was of this valley, waiting for soldiers to come—it loved them, it lay upon them heavily, but they trotted on beneath its weight with their baby flags nodding and flickering.

Up through the floor rose Mrs. Fanning’s wail: Daughter, oh, daughter—what on earth is happening. That noise— She laughed wisely, and pounded on the floor with her knee to let Mrs. Fanning know that she had heard. Tyler and the entire army, or so it seems—that’s what is happening. It’s the Seventy-second Pennsylvania and thirty other Seventy-second Pennsylvanias; some of them are in the Emmetsburg road and some in the fields, and some have bulged the very fences aside. And these are cannon and they come helter-skelter, and behind our house I can hear other cannon in the Pike. The village is being possessed by all these Seventy-second Pennsylvanias or heaven knows what you call them.