At last she got up and found Mr. Fanning beside her, bending down, crying. My dear little lady, why didn’t you answer, you have given mother such a turn—come at once. “Yes,” she said, and went with him into the rear hallway. She imagined that the roaring multitudes who chased along the ridge were going to a fire—maybe they had buckets, maybe they would put it out … “I hear groaning again,” she told Mr. Fanning. “It is close. I think out on the stoop—we heard it, before—” They unlatched the door and looked out. There were two dusty shoes sprawled close beside the door, and legs stretched down over the step. In terror, rushing, saying brief words, they hovered over the man. He had been shot through the throat—somehow he had made his way to this porch, and here he was. He kept rolling his eyes and squeezing his tongue out through fat, steel lips. His hands had torn the clothing around his neck, and had raked furrows in his flesh as well. Aaahh he kept murmuring, a secret which he whispered to himself countless times. They dragged him up on the porch; he was about eighteen, Irene thought, and he had a pale skin dotted with tiny orange freckles. His clawing fingers, the nails crammed with shredded skin—they grew from hands which were as slender as a flute player’s, and all raw and blistered by harness and guns. The gasping cry which he uttered was changing now, even as they brought him into the kitchen. His green eyes swiveled in raw sockets, and saw nothing of the room or the faces above. Then moisture came up in his throat; he made a trilling sound, and blood coursed across the clean-scrubbed floor, and he wadded the woman’s gown in his hand as he died.

Chapter 4

4.

General Reynolds fell quickly and easily, without a sound. Lieutenant Steele saw him go; he had had no premonition of the general’s death, and it would be long before he grew accustomed to the knowledge that the well-remembered dark face, the silent manner, the alert eyes, existed only in decay and shroudings.