Good God in heaven, if only she didn’t see that! But when Dan looked at her face, he knew that she had seen. “Take him over to the house,” he heard her say, and he nodded. How often, he thought, must I carry these victims around? He crossed the pasture with the squawling thing in his arms, and when he turned he could see the girl coming along slowly … The Confederate surgeon said, Ha, when they’ve got the worms you can’t wager much. There’s one like that inside, only worse—trochanters and neck of the left femur shattered, ball lodged near the acetabulum, and maggots by the wagon-load … Dan searched for Irene in the kitchen and rear entry; she had gone to her room. There was nothing for him to do but walk to the village and hunt Elmer Quagger.

Chapter 4

4.

All this had been recited by the Book of The Revelation. It did not coincide word for word or verse for verse, but still it was the sum of a vision: the Reverend Solt walked in Washington street as far as they would let him go, and he recognized that the same lightnings and thunderings which had overpowered the countryside on Wednesday afternoon were recurring on Thursday, and Saint John the Divine might have suggested that there would be two days of it.

The throne could be the cemetery hill, and the sea of dust, baking in its hundred degrees, could be called a sea of glass like unto crystal. But Saint John had noted only four beasts and here were many thousands of beasts, quick and dead … Seals? There would indeed be an hundred and forty-four thousand people sealed, if this kept on. Already he had seen a hundred soldiers sealed with thin red wax, lying like sots in yesterday’s storm.

So it had begun again in spite of the heat, in spite of Christ, in spite of the very hills which stood in the way; it began about four o’clock, and there was little to be gained for God if you sat by your kitchen table, making notes for a sermon on Romans, Fourteenth Chapter, Seventeenth Verse: “For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” He had not learned to write until he was thirteen years old, and the notes on which he depended were a slavery done as penance for his long benightedness; he had not entered into the Kingdom until he was grown a man … He searched Romans for a better text and thought he had found it in the Eleventh Chapter, Thirty-fourth Verse: “For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor?”