Dan went into Gettysburg at noon, walking near the edge of the Baltimore Pike. The road was a narrow mire where wagons and guns argued for the right of way, with officers flapping heedlessly past them. Word had spread across the hills as soon as the first troops left the cemetery and crept warily down toward outlying houses: the rebs moved out, they’re laying on that higher ground over past the town, and maybe old Bob Lee’s had enough.

A squad of pickets waited beside the cemetery, and another squad near the intersection of the Emmetsburg road, but it was easy to avoid them by crawling across tumbled walls and striking north along the grassy slopes. Endless, shoddy rolls clouded the sky, a purple menace near the northwest horizon; there would be more rain. Out over the eastern valley you could see a long column of cavalry moving toward the village, with outriders on either flank holding far ahead of the advance.

The guns still bickered inside Dan’s ears … when he looked back across a lane he could see that the tracks he left were sliding and uneven. Duffey had been sound asleep when Bale left the hospital, and could not be roused out of the damp blanket in which he had wrapped himself. Tyler Fanning was delirious, and demanding shrilly that the entire army be bucked and gagged.

Bale came up into a garden behind a brick house on the hillside. A few soldiers and a sobbing woman were gathered around a long shape shrouded in a pink comforter. Two men with shovels scooped out a grave among the muddy onion-tops. The soldiers looked at Dan with lusterless eyes, and the woman had her face buried in a shawl …

He asked, “Who is it?” and a fat sergeant turned and rubbed his nose with a black finger. “A lady,” he told Dan. “She got hit by a bullet through the door of that house. They said she was killed instanter.”

Dan looked at the house—a double one, of brick, and he did not know who lived there. He walked on through the adjoining garden. Two pale women peered from their cellarway, watching the burial party.

“Who is it?” he inquired again.

They said, “The Wade girl. She was making biscuit dough. It was yesterday morning,” and he could see that they were wondering who he might be.

“Wade girl.” He walked on a few steps, and then turned. “Which one?” They said, drearily enough: “Ginny. The other’n’s Mrs. McClellan.” Dan kept thinking: buried in a pink comforter. The rebels killed her, and probably did not know it, and they did not know that those girls were named Virginia and Georgia … heard a child coming up on Grandfather’s porch and saying, Ma sent your new shirts. She says tell her if the cuffs aren’t right.