A lone man was racking the whole county with his scream, back where the battery of rifled guns had stood: a man who lay amid the broken wheels and smoking harness, and he had been there all the time but you couldn’t hear him until the guns stopped. One of Henry Niede’s straw-stacks was burning, near the barn, its tiny sparks squirting up in a thick purge of flame … The scream in the rear continued; it stopped; the last haze fell away, and a man in citizen’s clothes was there in the wreckage.

Dan croaked, “Doctor Duffey,” but nobody looked at him. This seemed a most grotesque fabrication, it was a more violent lie than any he would tell to Tyler. The fat man grew there, on his knees in the hot mess of the exploded caisson. The final crush of Confederate artillery had lightened, and troubled waters gushed in everyone’s ears. It was impossible to realize that such thunder might ever have an end.

Bale made his way slowly up the pasture, stepping over the men who lay there. Duffey was a cartoon of the Duffey whom Bale had known once. He possessed fish eyes and a seamed, baggy face; he had been floundering in blood; the cups of his hands were brown and sticky. “I was back by the stables, back at General Meade’s house,” he roared. “This man has been shot to bits. I thought I would be doing something for him, but he was shot to bits. It’s a marvel he could yell about it, being shot to bits.” Only two rebel guns still fired—distinct reports—you could tell them. A sulphur bolster swelled up a mile and a half wide, God knew how long or how thick. The silver sun tried to get through it.

Dan cried again, Doc!… Well?… Duffey seemed to say: I know you, you were once my friend, once I was a man and had friends, we are both here, what does it matter? His enormous voice blurbed: “Cut off. I was cut off, that day, with old Salt and the carryall. I’ve been here—since—”