There was white powder all over the wet roadway like a fall of snow, in thin windrows as the scattering shovels had tossed it. From some distance away Bale could see a limp red banner dangling in front of the church; that narrow flag was the insignia of a hospital, and flags such as that hung on many of the houses. Boys gathered around a horse-block at the edge of the street; every now and then a sharp explosion would sound from the center of the group, and the boys would all be laughing delightedly. They had whole boxes of percussion caps and they were touching them off with a hammer … A group of women came down the church steps and trailed drearily toward a New Rochelle wagon which waited in the road, with its driver holding the halters of the nervous team. He called, You kids better quit that monkeying! .. The women moved slowly, for two of them were supporting a slight, white-faced girl between them. “It’s God’s mercy, Genevievey,” one of them was saying in a tuneless voice. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And the folks said he would have been a cripple, always, if he had lived. We must praise the Lord that he ain’t lying in an unmarked grave.” The girl said, shrilly: “Never got to see him.” They pulled her along.

Dan climbed the steps; the smell came out and struck him like a board. A woman cried, rather peevishly, “Yes, yes, sir? Please don’t stand in the door.” “I beg your pardon.” Oh, Mr. Jarvis, she called past him to somebody in the street, don’t forget the tincture of sesquichloride of iron. Then she said, Yes, yes, again, and looked up into Dan’s face, patting her hands together.

She had a face like an unripe peach, fuzzy with gray, wind-bitten and yellowish. Her eyes were good eyes—clear and vigorous with a militant pity.

“I’m looking for a man named Huddlestone.”

“Dearie me,” she said, “we haven’t their names on the reel, sir. We don’t know half. But you can come in and see. Are you certain he’s in this hospital? This is the Harrisburg Christian Commission. You can come in and look. Look a-plenty.”

They were in the pews and on the floor as well. The pews had been turned face-to-face and pushed together to form wide troughs. The men made a murmur like a colony of water-birds, gabbling and cooing in concert. Dan walked slowly between the rows, looking down at hairy faces. No more lemons, one hoarse person kept insisting, at the far side of the high-ceiled room. No—more—lemons. The eyes rolled listlessly, following Dan as far as they could, and then staring at the space he had last filled.