Perhaps he slept. It was a kind of unconsciousness which had never visited him before. Once he jerked and sat up, aware of peril, staring dizzily at a horse without a rider which came screaming out of the thin oaks—a horse with saddle crooked and stirrups swinging, and knots of pink and gray hanging from its rear. Head low, it plunged through the old rails at full gallop and drove into the side of the barn. The rotten building trembled for a moment; the horse lay shuddering, and screaming no longer; it had made the cry which resounds for hours after the parent impulse has vanished. Bale lay back and looked at the sky. Again he tightened his convulsive grasp on the sod.

And again he saw the Fannings in their cellar … She is safer there, he told himself, the horse-scream still inside him. She would be more alarmed if she should see me now; if I made my way over there and rapped at the cellar window and tried to talk to her, it would reawaken something which must sleep until this noise has stopped and the armies have gone away. Here I am, strong as an ox, lying in the yard like a schoolboy who has smoked his first cigar. If only I hadn’t gone into the buttery, if only I hadn’t thought to eat.

Now he vomited as surely and completely as ever Tyler had done, and he rolled over in the grass away from it. The ground kept going up and down. People whooped and yodeled; the inveterate guns made their lingo; people dashed by with troops of horses, but no more of them came into his yard to die.

After a long while he arose, all alone in the middle of the lawn, giddiness still whirling behind his eyes. Somewhere in this unwinding landscape the Knouse home came to rest; he imagined that he had stayed the crazy dance of the entire countryside, merely by putting his hand on the stone rim of the nasturtium bed. He wanted to call to Mrs. Knouse, deep in her cellar refuge, clutching her spoons and her dead husband’s watch and her best green teapot—cry out to her and say: “You wouldn’t believe me at first, you hag! Now you’d better hide under the beef barrel. They’re yelling in this direction, much closer than they were before; the guns are louder and more numerous, and you watch what happens to the village now.”

He looked toward Fannings’, and when he had put the house in its proper place he could see that the rear door was open. Demon dragged something out to the stoop.