Through the white lime, Dan walked over to the Huddlestone house, and he was seventy-five years old. Elijah’s mother sat in her rocker on the porch, and Eva Duffey and Amelia Niede and Mrs. Joe Leen were all there, talking to her. Amelia was knitting something with red wool. They all began to flutter and call anxiously as Dan turned in at the gate: What news? He thought, Get it over while they’re here together. “I’ve got bad news,” he said, and surely they could have told that much. “Elijah was killed in the battle … Yes. I said— He was killed. He’s dead.” He said, coldly: “He and young Fisher joined the Union advance, and fought out by the Trostle farm. Fisher was wounded but Elijah was killed. We’ve just buried him, up at Ever Green.”

Amelia went down in a pile across the steps. She began, savagely: Oh-ho-ho, ho-ho-ho-ho. Mrs. Huddlestone stopped rocking; Eva Duffey stumbled toward her, and Dan turned away and left them.

He walked along Chambersburg street and didn’t notice anybody. At the fork he turned out on the Fairfield road, and went with the ruts mashing under his shoes. There were a lot of rigs on the road, more of them coming into town than going out. People looked at him as they jolted past; they had bundles and boxes on their laps, and so many of them were women. Christian Commission, Sanitary Commission: make milk punch for wounded folks and say, Don’t forget the tincture of sesquichloride of iron. He went in at the lane leading up to the Fannings’. Mules and horses lay here, but they had been dragged out of the track; the smell was thinner than south of town.

There was an officer’s horse tied to the front hitch-post, and a new-looking carryall around in back—he didn’t know whose it was. He went up to the front door, and Gretel met him there. “Tell Mrs. Fanning—Mrs. Tyler Fanning—that I’d like to see her a minute,” he said.

She asked him to come inside. Straw was scattered through the hall and library; Demon worked in the sitting room with a hammer, taking up the carpet; there would be a new carpet, now.

Dan heard someone on the stairs. Irene wore a blue gown with white dots in it, and she was wiping her hands in a tiny towel with a lace border. “Oh,” she said.

There was no one else around. “I came to see you,” he said.

“Tyler is to lose his left limb.”

Bale looked at the floor. The girl wore shining, ebony slippers; he could see the tips of them under the hem of her dress. “Yes,” she said, “I believe they will amputate it tomorrow. The surgeon says he will recover. You did—tell him…” She said, “Didn’t you?”