The tallow face came close again, and Orcutt chewed his lip for a time. He announced, at length. “Yes. Dead. There is no doubt. The door wrote. He signed himself D. F. Albright, Surgeon. It was a bullet through the head. He did not suffer long.”

“I’m sorry,” Dan said. He was trying to tame his voice; the batteries still rumbled in his ears. “I—” He reached through the darkness and found Julius Orcutt’s skeleton hand, and wondered how it could be hot instead of cold.

Finally, the lawyer withdrew his hand from Bale’s grasp. “Walking,” he said. “Do you believe it was true, Dan? The letter? I cannot endure the thought of his suffering.”

“Oh, it must be true.”

He banged around with his umbrella, and went away down the path. “I have walked miles,” he said, and then something else which could not be understood. Dan stood for awhile, listening to those feet swishing in the mud. He went upstairs and lay down on the soiled bed-clothing. The world screwed away, high and dry, and left him in a mine.

Once he got up, remembering the decanter on his desk, remembering what was in it, and he staggered through sunlight into Mrs. Knouse’s yard and took a drink from her well. There was a constant rattle of vehicles in the Pike; he heard them dimly, after he was in his room again. When he awakened the second time the sun was shining still. Or shining again. He thought it might be Tuesday forenoon, and later learned that this was correct.

Weak and ravenous as he was, he brought water and managed to bathe and shave. There were still clean shirts left in his bureau, and one suit of clean underwear. Now he lived in a feverish and blasted world, and suffered the knowledge that he had helped to make it feverish and blasted. A terrific accumulation of unsolved problems were mountainous before him, more problems than he would ever be able to deal with. When he shaved the ragged whiskers away, he found that his cheek-bones did not fit his face, and how could anyone know him now?

No, she did not come near. She did not reason how it might be with me … strange pack of anxiety stowed within this head. I should have something—some philosophy—

When he had dressed it was past noon, and starvation thrilled his toes and fingertips. A farmer in an old Germantown gave him a ride to the Diamond, and Dan went into the Emblem Hotel and found a vacant chair in the dining room.