“I have no idea what I’m going to do. Now, go off and give Mrs. Wurke her tonic. And ask her about my old trunk. Folks are apt to be arriving at any time: they won’t like to see me naked.”

The doctor stuffed the immense wad of green paper into one of his coat pockets, and took out a snowy handkerchief of pink and white silk. He touched it to his eyes. “You’re a man, Daniel,” he whispered. “It’s an uneasy world. I wish I knew what would become of us all.” He opened the door and waddled into the hall. “Elijah,” he said over his shoulder, “is down in the buggy. He waited there while I came in to see if you were awake. I think Elijah is afraid of people who have died, poor lad. And him wanting to be a soldier.”

“Send him up,” ordered Dan. “I may need help with the trunk, anyway. And ask him to bring this pitcher full of water when he comes. If you make a body servant out of Hud, I don’t see why I can’t do the same.”

He heard the rumble of Adam Duffey’s descent, the monumental talking of walnut boards beneath their moving burden of meat and bone and broadcloth … By standing close behind the muslin curtain, he could look down across a narrow front lawn with its guarding palisade of blue-white fencing, and see Duffey’s carryall standing beneath the biggest elm, a wheel cramped against the box and old Salt reaching up with ugly yellow teeth exposed, trying to wrench off some elm leaves.

Elijah Huddlestone sat in the driver’s seat, with one foot elevated on the spotty leather dashboard. Last night he had been only one of those talking faces. Now he was an extremely tall young man in white shirt-sleeves and checkered waistcoat, who wore a round, fuzzy hat drawn well down on his forehead. He had a slender black mustache curling around the corners of his mouth. There was a sense of petulance, of balked desire, in the Elijah who sat there. From that distance Dan could not see the shape of the man’s hands, but he knew that they were just as slender-boned and girlish as ever, and every bit as white.

Duffey called softly from the front porch. Elijah wrapped the reins around the whipstock and came up the brick walk, rubbing his hands on the seat of his trousers.