The doctor stood up. “There are folks in town that I must see to. Take Katie Huffmaster. The child will be frantic in all this heat.” It seemed a long moment before he found his balance and stood with weight adjusted on his quivering legs.

You could do nothing with him. He was knowing a shock far stranger than the common crudity of physical exhaustion; he babbled of nasal bones and masseters all the while Dan was bringing old Salt out of the weedy stable and harnessing him to the carryall. Duffey had courted this agony, and willingly would have embraced it for more hours than he could stand, but once the stimulus of torn bodies was taken from him, he said that he would go and he let nothing dissuade him. It was fantastic to think that he expected to find his ordinary routine awaiting him, a life without disruption, hours unshaken by Parrott guns. Ten pounds had evaporated mysteriously from under his skin since morning; his eyes lay in papery pockets, baggy envelopes falling against his cheeks. “There’s cannons and horsemen making hell on the Pike,” he kept saying, “but they must let me pass because I’m a physician. I can keep one wheel across the ditch until I come to the bridge, and I’ll be out of their way if they go trying to run me down.” He drove out of the yard; the smoke and the noise claimed him once he was in the highway.

A man bent from his plunging horse and howled in Dan’s face, “Where’s that old fool bound for? Doesn’t he know this is a fight? If he was my father—” and then rode swearing away. The turnpike length was turbulent with messengers and tumbling wagons of ammunition. Old Salt danced and sawed between the shafts, but Duffey kept him bravely in his course along the ditch; the oilcloth curtain at the rear of the carryall was bound up in a tight roll and through the aperture you could see the doctor’s head rolling on his shoulders, his hat jammed tight, his arms straining against the reins. He did not look back. Dan had the notion that he would be killed by a stray shell before he got out of sight. With relief, he watched the vehicle sag at last around the curve and vanish into town through mauling dust.