The lawyer clamped the bent gold bows over his gaunt ears. “Two camps of rumors, I might say. One group has it that you are a Secessionist—a Copperhead.” He gulped over the word as if he had stepped across a puddle of dung. “The other group, in which I am happy to join with hope, declares that you are going into the army; that already you have been offered a commission with the Minnesota volunteers.”

“They’re both wrong. I’m not a Copperhead, and most certainly I am not going into the army.”

Orcutt’s assistant, a youth who had been reading law books in the office for the past year, came limping up the rutted stairway with the mail. He looked like a sallow, clubfooted monk in his baggy gray waterproof. He placed letters upon the lawyer’s desk, nodded at Bale, and went rustling and dripping into his cubby-hole opposite the cold stove.

“I’ll be going,” said Dan. Orcutt made no reply. Only when his blundering fingers had lit a candle to push back the growing darkness of the office, only then could Dan see that the man’s eyes were narrow and watery behind his round spectacles.

One of the letters was shaking in his hand. “Benjy,” he said, with difficulty. The damp, thumb-smeared envelope had a crude red-and-blue cartoon in its upper left-hand corner, one of those myriad cartoons which blotched on half the envelopes clogging the mails. It depicted a scrawny rooster in a liberty cap trampling on a scrawnier rooster with a Jeff Davis beard … Dan moved his feet.

Orcutt’s damp glance slanted up at him. “Wait,” he said. “Benjy was expecting to be a corporal soon.” He spread the coarse wad of paper closer to the candle, and began to read aloud with no further apology or explanation.

My Dear Father: