Dan said, “My neighbor. She’s old…” And she’d been down there for twenty-four hours. Dan set his hand around the ridge which covered the crack between the two doors, and pulled; the strip ripped off with a shattering. He slid his fingers through the crack and pushed a wooden bar inside. Then he could lift the twin doors, and the morning sped down ahead of him.

It smelled of fruit and potatoes, of damp spices and the queer, old-lady herbs which would be sacked and put away in such a place. There was no window. Bale stood for a moment in the cavern, blinking at darkness. Shadows of the two officers shafted across the cellarway. He heard himself informing them, “Here she is,” and all the time he thought it strange that Mrs. Knouse should have been killed by this catastrophe which had barely crushed down her hollyhocks. She lay on her face between two tubs, a limp rag of checkered gingham from which claw-like hands spread out and patterned the loose dirt. He picked her up and carried her out into the garden.

She was not dead, but her pulse fluttered like an imprisoned moth, captured inside the wrinkled brown wrist. Her face looked very shrunken and accusing. “Water,” Dan said, and one of the soldiers ran to the well. The other man, and he was the colonel with the broken nose, took up one of the homely hands and began to rub it gently. He declared, “I always say, sir, that war is worse on the widows and orphants than on us men who fight it.”

They bathed her face but her eyes did not open; once she swallowed on nothing; the pulse still capered, however feebly. The colonel brought out a green glass flask and held it speculatively to the light.

“This here’s Maryland liquor. I don’t know that it’s scarcely fit to drink.”

Dan forced Mrs. Knouse’s lips apart, and let the whiskey seep between her snag-teeth. She gagged, and swallowed again; one hand lifted, fell back.

“I’d say she was coming ’round.”

Dan said, “We’ll see. If she’d lain down there awhile longer—” All the time a strange, horned Reason stood behind him, shrieking that there was no justice in reviving this decrepit witch, merely because she was a woman; the burial party was covering better wads than she, and dozens of them, and heaven knew how many other burial parties there were.

She whispered, “Rebels,” and mourned about it for awhile, gurgling. The sun grew hotter, and all the time these men ministered to her they were ruining more of her garden. They gave her additional whiskey, and her eyes opened warily as if expecting enemies to pounce, and ready to slide behind their pink lids at the first attack.

“Mrs. Knouse,” Bale entreated.