The Diamond was all mud and horses and soggy files of blue men. Dan went lurching along Chambersburg street; from every house he saw pinched faces peering out, and there was the incessant crying of children—crying monotonously, as if they had made that their business for many days. Limber chests and upset wagons and dead horses lay along the street, and now in the dull distance he could see a line of faded blue, spread out past the curve in the turnpike. Far ahead sounded two or three shots, lonely and trivial under the thunder which growled overhead.

A sentinel set a bayonet in front of him. “No thoroughfare,” he ordered.

Dan caught at the yard-fence beside him. “Aren’t they—gone?” he asked.

“They’re on the hill ahead. We got skirmishers feeling along the edge of town.”

“I would like to reach my house. It’s—”

The soldier shifted his tobacco cud. “No, sir. See those batteries up the road? No telling when they’ll open up and fire. But I think the Butternuts got enough—Lord knows we got a bellyful ourselves.”

In a dreamy void, he started back toward the square. The houses swam on each side with the utmost stupidity; he heard a young girl call, inside a doorway, Ma—ain’t that Mister Bale going past? Pshaw, Nellie, and it is some other man comes … behind him the solitary musket-shots kept ringing across the northwest fields near his home, but they were isolated shots. He said, aloud, “Quite unenthusiastic,” and then a fence flew up and stuck him sharply on the cheek … lay there with crickets in his ears. Hey, Al Kendall, looky there. Horses stopped in the road, and two soldiers came to pick him up.

They said: “You’d better go in here somewhere and let people ‘tend you.” “If you’re not drunk,” they added.

They set him on his feet. Can go it alone, he said, and started on. He did manage to cross the Diamond, sliding on the cobbled crossing, and he found the Duffey house squatting in the same place where it had always been … Eva Duffey had her arms around him, and she was crowing: “Do you know where Adam is? Do you know where—?”

Lay on a couch; it started to glide through the wall into immeasurable wildernesses beyond. “He’s all right, I tell you,” a chorus of voices told Mrs. Duffey. With him all night and with the wounded. He was not wounded or killed or wounded killed wounded killed as soon as wakes up will get back to town.

It rained again, undammed torrents to wash away brigades of wounded men, and Dan turned over on the couch and looked out of the window. The water walked as erect hail above the dusky lawn, spouting from the eaves-trough in a solid trunk against the rain-water barrel.