Swaddled head nodding. “Little—little— And we walked in the wheat. They were all along the fence. Those men of Hundred Forty-eighth Pennsylvania thought we wouldn’t be able to shoot much. But showed ’em we could too. They said Home Guards. I was too young.”

There was no need to say goodbye; it would mean nothing. Little Round Top. There was a lane running down past the Trostle farm and a wide wheat field on the other side of it, to the south. He can’t be dead, Dan said aloud, and then he was on the steps. He stood there, looking up and down in the hot sunshine. In the next square he saw an old single buggy with a sorrel mare hitched to it, and a man in a linen duster climbing down over the wheel.

He ran along the sidewalk and waved his hand. Finis Sketchley turned, stopped, started up toward the house steps, and stopped again. “Oh,” he said, when Bale came up, “I didn’t know who that was, sonny. Ought to see the ruination up at Ever Green. They’ve marked it up terrible. I ain’t been hardly able to eat or sleep with—”

Bale said, “Where are you going now?”

The old undertaker jerked his thumb toward the house with its hospital flag. A soldier came out on the porch, limping, leaning on a mop-handle. “Two just died in here, Dan. I never been so busy in my life: I’ve laid out a fair hundred.”

“Lend me your mare and buggy for a couple of hours.”

“Can’t do it. You better go to the livery stable.

“The devil,” Bale said. “There aren’t any horses left around here. I couldn’t get a rig for love or money—there’s too many strangers. I’ll pay you—” He said, “Anything.” He fumbled in his pocket and found a ten dollar gold piece. “Here,” he said.

Sketchley’s crazy eye kept winking at him. Then, reluctantly, he reached up his bony hand. “All right, you take her. Be sure to gentle her. I can walk back to see about my ice. Think of it,” he said, “a good ten thousand corpses. Yes, I guess ten. There’s doctors and doctor students coming here from Philadelphia and York and all over; plenty corpses won’t ever get buried.”

Dan climbed into the buggy and slapped the reins. Sketchley cried in alarm, Gentle her! and the mare went puffing away … Bale drove out Baltimore street past a train of toiling wagons, and swung right at the Emmetsburg road intersection, then left again at the sluice which led up over the hill. He could make better time across the fields, littered as they were, with all the fences down; the Emmetsburg road would be blocked by splintered cannon and fallen horses.