Dan crossed the pasture, circling wide to avoid the workers and the few wads as yet unburied. There was something happening along the Pike in front of his house. He came through the yard to find the fence lined with boys and men who took off their hats as a group of riders came by. There were seven of the horsemen pacing down the hill from Johnsons’ house, and foremost rode a big, gray-bearded soldier on a horse nearly as pale as old Salt. The man wore a pearl-gray hat, and he had some glasses in his hand. He bowed toward the front porch, acknowledging a salute, and he called in a clear voice: “I shall want you in about an hour, General, at General Hill’s headquarters,” and then rode on toward the town. He did not look as Dan had thought he would look … that same expression Bale had seen the day before, in the eyes of the dusty Reynolds who trotted toward the seminary under the apple trees. They were trying to kill men, each trying to kill the other’s, and now one was dead and one still alive. It seemed too strange that they should have the identical far-seeing obsession in their eyes.

Chapter 3

3.

As the dead cavalry horse in the ditch underwent its chemistry, so Daniel Bale felt that his brain was bloating before an inevitable extinction. Dimly he tried to think, If I had stayed in the west, if I had let Grandfather be buried without my coming … Beyond that cowardly chiding he could not continue. Every main-stay of his intelligence was exhausted: Plotinus, Eckhart, Tauler were distant words, not even names, and he had not the courage to reach for any philosophy. He knew certainly that he would never be able to bring it back.

He thought now that he was losing every ambition and dream for the future. Quite as a boyish lover, before this war completed its circumscription, he had toyed with a vision in which he saw himself and Irene gone into the haze of western sky, following a long road across the mounds of blue-stem. Together they could take the mystic refuge of wilderness as it was offered, and not question or analyze it. He had seen them driving through Big Hell Slough, and had watched her wonder at the million blackbirds which broke away from them, fluting, brushing their scarlet humps against the sky. He had wanted to show her the prairies; he had wanted her to sleep in a wagon box with him, and come to the grist mill which once he had owned and now might own again if he chose.