The thick coffee ate into his stomach. His jaws were sore; kept chewing and chewing; he was ravenous, but it hurt to swallow. “I know how it goes,” sneered the major. He was beetle-browed, and his sneer had been designed for him when he was a child. “But you’d better join the army. If you’re going to be shot at you might as well get greenbacks for it. Now you’ll have to excuse me, my friend; I’ve got a war to fight. You’ll find Webb’s brigade over to the left—we extend Gibbon at the edge of these trees, and Webb’s in Gibbon’s Division.” He peered past the oak trees ahead and over the board fence bounding them. Dan followed his gaze. A crowd of soldiers raced toward the Emmetsburg road, and a few hundred yards beyond was the Blisses’ barn with rapid streaks of smoke springing from haymow and windows. “Goodbye.” The officer rose. He added, gruffly, “Leave that coffee bottle there in the rocks; I need it. Don’t forget. Webb’s brigade of Gibbon’s Division.”

“It’s the Second Corps,” Bale said.

The officer’s angry face exploded. “This is the Second Corps!” He went sliding away between the trees, revolver holster swinging against his leg.

Dan picked his way south. There were no more bullets sighing across from the Bliss barn, but around the barn lifted a rally of howls, the rapid spanking of shots, and everywhere men were standing up to watch the action on their front … He asked again. They said the something-or-other New York. Then he came out past the trees. There were no buzzards in the sky but an odor washed up through the dry daisy field, over sweltering hay and fence-vines; something dead, over by Codoris’, and God knows it’s no calf. The climbing sun made a gold rinse on the western ridge and the ridge was quartz—myriad little sparkles of metal over there. That’s what the rebels look like to an enemy; now I am almost an enemy; they are not men who sing oh let not my own love, men named English, men eating bacon at a kitchen table. Now I know why the buzzards were here.

Sweat came out all over him. They knew. He cried it again in his mind. Even Tyler knew … Heads turning; a lounging rim of rifle-stocks and soiled suspenders and brass buttons within the boundary of the board fence. What is this? Something-or-other New York. Still New York. There was the rock-oak copse; blue men were picnicking around it, the little field frothed with people watching the toy battle at Blisses’ barn. All these soldiers had clover-leaves on their caps, and suddenly the color had changed.

Flint eyes questioned him. He croaked, “No, I’m not a soldier. Citizen—” What in hell? The boy said.