It was a long walk. This town strung itself along ten roads, dusty or muddy spokes which ran out from the hub, the Diamond. It was a little town but the long avenues blended into gray distance before the houses had ceased. The homes were red and pink, yellow and white; they squatted, with thick walls and no eaves at all, like the placid cattle which chewed their cuds in Niede’s beech wood-lot. You thought: a dairy town, a place where there is thick grass in every rear yard and cool butter in the pantries … Overhead, a tree-toad broke the nearer silence; it stopped its sawing, frightened at its own wheeze, then began once more. The bells for prayer meeting had ceased ringing. Distant clumps of bushes stood out with the momentary distinctness of early evening, then sank lower into blue dusk. A drum lived somewhere under the earth, a huge and empty resonance which supported the faraway fifing.

There were a few rigs in the Diamond, and early lights burned in several stores, but the people had all moved farther on, along York street. Huddlestones’ house was dark. There were more rigs ahead, and people walking. Dan could hear the mottled fever of their conversation while he was yet two squares away. That was Deffenbaughs’ place; Japanese lanterns shone along the low porch, though colors could still be distinguished in the tardy gloaming. Horses whinnied up and down the side street; this was all like a fair, and Dan smiled half-ashamed as he found himself walking faster. The martial music began again. He thought, “That was a game we played when we were children, and now they’re using it with their drill.” Peddler, have you boots for children … the drums rattled and banged.

They had a big sign, painted with black letters on an old sheet hung behind those four paper lanterns. Ladies Aid Ice Cream & Cake Benefit U.S. San Comm. There didn’t seem to be many customers; a couple of little girls were standing beside a kitchen table eating their portions, and at the end of the porch Grandpa Deffenbaugh was doing something with a big wooden tub. Women fluttered up and down the path with plates and baskets. But the main horde of people froze in a thick crust around three sides of the field which bordered the home on its eastern width, held back by a white fence.