Steele could never recall much of what happened, for some time afterward. He remembered that Doubleday said something about retiring General Reynolds’ body to a place of safety; Meredith’s brigade and the rebels were fighting like fury down the hill toward that biggest creek, and it looked like the enemy might come through at any time. You could see dun clouds of rebels, far across the northwest fields, whenever the fog thinned enough … Steele had four privates with him, and they had placed the body on a stretcher. The canvas was dry with old death, black and scaly. Steele removed his blouse and spread it under the general’s head—he was not willing for that face to press against the blood of God-knew-whom. They went past the seminary; Steele halted the men, and entered the building and somewhere he found a clean tablecloth. He didn’t ask permission; the masters of this academy could God damn well let John Reynolds have their tablecloth when he needed it. The lieutenant would have shot anyone who tried to stop him, and he would have done it seriously and considerately.

With two men carrying the stretcher, and the other two walking beside it with fixed bayonets, Steele went past the skimpy orchard, down the slope. He walked behind. He dramatized each moment with an intensity of self-torture. He must follow, follow … whither thou goest, I shall go. Perhaps it was “I will follow” or “there also will I go”—Jack Steele wasn’t a close student of the Scriptures, although his father was a Methodist deacon. Men—wounded, most of them—kept coming up and asking in hushed voices, “Hey. Who’s that you got there?” and the privates would whisper out of the corners of their mouths: “Reynolds. He’s dead,” until Steele snapped them into silence. Halfway down the rocky pasture below the school, he was approached by a big, smooth-shaven man in civilian clothes who came through a gap in the rail fence and hurried toward the stretcher. The man had sober, gray eyes and powerful hands; his shirt and trousers were stained with blood in varying degrees, though he didn’t seem to be hurt at all.

He said, explosively, and not as one accustomed to addressing officers: “Bring him over here to my house. There’s a doctor, with instruments and medicine— He can—”

The lieutenant told him: “He can do nothing for this man. He is dead.”

“I didn’t know you bothered carrying off the dead ones,” the civilian cried. There was a defiant challenge in his gaze, a bitter accusation; Steele recognized it dully, but he was too broken to take issue. He felt his nostrils swelling. “Sir, this is the body of General John Reynolds! All right, men—” and on they went. He thought about the big, blood-stained civilian hours afterward, and wondered who he was.