“No,” Bale told him. He tapped the bowl of his pipe against the edge of the truck, and a host of red flakes sprayed into the darkness. “I don’t hold with some of your notions. I am not in favor of this war, or any war. I’m sorry you’ve lost an arm, and sorry for most of those who are dead. But I don’t intend to go to war, if that’s what you wish to know.”

He became aware that the rails were checking and crunching under the squeeze of distant wheels. A whistle squawled half-heartedly beyond the black belt of trees.

The agent cleared his throat and spat over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, “some holds one way, some another, I don’t mind saying there’s plenty of Copperheads right in this county.”

“I’m no Copperhead.”

“No, no. I never said you was. Say, you don’t need to be in no hurry to pick up your valise, friend. The train won’t go for twenty minutes—the one heading west. This here one goes north.”

He went into the station, carrying the green-glass lantern with him. A plume of smoke wavered off from the open doorway. Bale could hear the man whistling, Now, Moses, what makes you so strange and forgetful … Steel was banging and frying and torturing itself, not far up the track. The engine rounded a curve and spread its buxom shaft of light down the cindered roadway. It came on like a hissing, malodorous animal, tiny freckles of orange showing through cracks and bolt-holes in a hundred places. The two coaches behind it were rickety, and illuminated by futile, brownish lamps.

Dan jumped down from the truck and pushed his extension-case into the shadows where it seemed reasonably safe and out of the way. He walked away from the train as it gasped terrifically up to the station. There would be more people, and he had seen all the people he wanted to see for a long time. Not many years before, he had suffered recurrent nostalgia for the settled complacency, the solid and ever-present population of even a rural community in the East. That was all past. One could not travel for six days, pushing ever farther into a scrambling and more tightly-peopled country, without seeing all faults, existent and nonexistent in mere men and women.

In his brief conversation with the one-armed agent, he realized that he had been wholly absurd. Six days before, he would not have mentioned that empty sleeve to the man who owned it.