Tuesday night the whole corps lay at Uniontown still, though the Fifth Corps and the Pennsylvania Reserves passed on to the northeast. Farmers gathered around the picket lines with dire stories about the rebel cavalry, and how they had raided Westminster, a few miles to the right. Roads were noisy with staff officers hammering up and down, and lanterns glowed in the headquarters tents; the vast, mysterious honesty of moonlight made the red fires ashamed of themselves. Tyler Fanning felt the familiar, groping bulge in his stomach. Organs would ripple in loose-drawn knots … it wasn’t more painful than the law allowed, but it was damned annoying. He sat on his rubber blanket, opening his clothing and massaging as Doctor Duffey had instructed him. If he went to the surgeon, the surgeon would only give him calomel. Well, there were a lot of snakes or little slimy beasts of some kind, wound up in his innards. The scarred hide was pulled together in a pink squeeze, like the neck of a paper sack, and the animals curled and uncurled inside, and refused to let him rest. Lose it, he thought, and feel better. He walked away from his snoring flock and stood among some weeds and put his finger down his throat. Afterward he felt weaker than a cat, and the tips of his fingers were buzzing. His feet, also, and a watery whirlpool inside each ear. God damn it, why couldn’t he be sleeping on a mattress?

They made thirty-five miles the next day. Thirty-five miles with gas booming inside him, even though he did have a horse to ride. There had been no rain in these northern counties; the dust was hot talcum. Men leaned over the fences all afternoon and yelled about a big battle up in Pennsylvania. Taneytown … this was a joke. Going home, home, home said the horse’s dragging feet, a muffled k-sound at the end of every beat. Home to find what’s what. To my certain knowledge, the informant has never told an untruth, at least not in the years I have known Said Informant, which is a long time. Elmer Quagger had testified in church, often enough—Ty had heard him, little boy sitting between his father and his mother … If this is true, I have done right in telling her, and I suppose that I must confront Bale. He will be a surly customer. Somehow he has been so queer and philosophical since boyhood—his education was a deep dye, and so I didn’t think that women interested him. He has learned new tricks, out west. Cannot try them on me, a captain … Ty drew his revolver out of its holster; it was extremely heavy; he let it drop back into the leather case again, and his tingling fingers had difficulty in anchoring the flap.

I was twenty, and I had not been wounded …