“She’s better off up here, then,” Bale said. He found a pair of heavy linen pantaloons; those would do, he decided, if he could discover a coat to go with them. They’d always been much too large. There was a black alpaca vest which might be all right … He straightened his back and found Elijah standing very erect, on the farther side of the bed, the dusty musket clamped against his side. “Ready,” said Hud. He snapped the heavy gun into a quick diagonal. “Take aim. Fire.” The lock went pik.

Dan shrugged. “You go at it as if you knew how.”

“We’ve been drilling all spring. Bart McKosh is the new drill-master. He lost a leg at Fredericksburg, you know.”

“Who’s we?”

“Oh, Charley Deffenbaugh and old man Gubbe and Ernie Dryer.”

“I thought Ernie Dryer lost his hand in an accident at the carriage works.”

“Yes, but he gets along well at drill. And a lot of folks from the college, and some of the Sem boys. Why don’t you join with us?”

“I’d be of no use to you. Not the way I feel.”

Hud shouldered the musket, thudded it down again. “Say, did anybody tell you about Wesley Culp? They say he’s in the rebel army.”

“He ought to have known better.”

“I suppose,” Elijah nodded, “that it was because he was down south before the war, and all.”

“You ought to know better, too,” Dan told him. “Everyone ought to know better. But of course they don’t. Human beings belie their designation every day, and have been doing so constantly for two years. The only hope is to keep on until all the fools are killed off. Then we might have—not peace, but at least a diversion of energy towards something else.”

There were welts of color on Huddlestone’s cheeks. “Perhaps—” he tried to make his voice smooth—“you don’t believe that the Union is sacred. Is anything sacred to you?”

“Nothing,” said Dan. “I reckon human life comes as close as anything else, though. Did you ever kill anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you ever kill anything?” repeated Dan.

Elijah’s face froze into a furious, pearly white. “Why, you damn fool, we went hunting together all the time when we were boys!”

“Yes,” Bale told him, “and we killed squirrels and partridges and two deer and I don’t know what all. And out west I killed two Indians that I know of, and maybe more. They were animals, too. That’s what I try to tell myself, always. But I’ve felt funny ever since.”

Huddlestone put the musket back in its corner, making a great to-do over placing the butt in its original position. When he turned he was smiling quietly. “We’re drilling on the lawn east of Deffenbaugh’s place Thursday night. If you should be walking out, stop by to watch. We drill very well.”