Voice gurgled, “Reckon it’s because they always put us in the hottest place. I’m most thankful to you for pulling me out of the deeloodge.”

He could do nothing in this cascade without the lantern. He left the wounded man burrowing against a rotten stump, and went splashing downhill, trying to light the lantern again as it swung on his arm. It was no use: the matches in his pocket were all too wet. A few lights still wavered along the rapid stream ahead, faint wailings still came out of the water. The rain threshed with a steady roar.

“Cloudburst,” Dan said aloud. He leaned heavily against a tree. Slowly a hand went around his ankle. A voice came up, full of certain knowledge. “This is a judgment which follows. Always.”

Dan cried, “Who are you?” and he bent down to touch the twisting mound of cloth and leather and cold fingers. “Are you alive?” he demanded crazily. “Are you—?”

The man loosed a shrill laugh. In any light his face would have shone prophetic and ghastly, but now he was only a nightmare voice dwelling underfoot. “Alive,” he repeated proudly. “Mister, I’ve seen it happen before. Was you in many battles before this? We tear the world with our cannons, and Providence brings this upon us. There’s—” he wailed on, his words imprinted by the constant thunder—“always a cloudburst, afterward. Always, after a battle—”

Dan tore the clutch from his ankle; he went on, stumbling from tree to tree, trying to reach the lights which still survived. But they went out, one at a time, before he got to them. Now there was no beam left in the world; the bubbling entreaties became weaker, forgotten in the murmur which trilled along the higher ground; in the darkness no one could rescue any more men. Rock Creek swam above its banks and carried them away.

The rain weakened with dawn, and Dan found Adam Duffey in the grove farther upstream. The doctor brooded like a patron witch among a tangle of bodies. He was adjusting a scrap of oilcloth over one man, wiping water from the face of another. He nodded at Dan through the gloom, and when he had recognized him he stood up and rubbed his hands together, “Do you remember the one with the swollen head on him, Daniel?” he asked. And when Bale said that he did, the old doctor bent close and lifted his blurring face. “I cured him,” he whispered, “I cured him, as sure as I’m a foot high.” He put his mouth close to his friend’s ear and said again, Cured him painlessly. I bled him.

Chapter 11

11.