In a pearl-blue dawn he awakened, chilly and cramped and sore, to find the dry lamp wick stinking as it smouldered, and to hear Doctor Duffey out in the hallway saying kindly, “Did you come all this way by yourself, Marta? You wait and go back with me.” A child’s voice murmured something. Elijah stood up and blinked. His ruptured abdomen puffed with sudden pain; he put on the truss before he went to the hall door. The doctor was there, solemn and sleepy, looking like a dressed-up herald or innkeeper from some medieval pageant. He wore a short night-shirt which hung straight from his round middle, and showed the firm calves of his hairy legs through splits at the bottom.

“It was Marta Kaufman.” said Duffey. “There she goes.”

In the soft dampness of early morning, the little yellow-haired girl stood on the block at the roadside, struggling to reach the broad back of a farm horse.

“Old Kaufman’s grandchild—she says he’s slipping fast. You get dressed, Elijah, and put old Salt into the carryall. I’ll be ready by then.”

Huddlestone watched Marta go riding away on the clumsy chestnut stallion. He shook his head. “I wonder if there’s any war news?”

“War news? No doubt, no doubt whatever. There’s hell and damnation every day, and especially on the finest of mornings.” The doctor sighed his way up the stairs.

Elijah pinched the glowing wick in the parlor, and drew on his clothes. He tried to imagine that this was a call to arms: while he slept in his tent, the sentries had come racing in with news of a morning assault. That was what happened to the Union army at Shiloh, people said—only the sentries didn’t get there soon enough to warn … He stopped in the kitchen and drank deeply from the blue dipper which hung over the water pail. The water tasted of moss, of frog pools and staleness. He hurried to the barn, and prodded the white horse out of its dreams. The eastern sky was frothy with apple colors.

He jangled along the pasty driveway in the carryall, but Doc hadn’t come out of the house yet. Huddlestone snapped the leash of the hitching-block in the ring of old Salt’s bit, and went into the house. He found the unshaven doctor, silk hat on the back of his head, hunting through a cabinet for some hidden potion.

“It’s the strychnine I’m hunting,” the old man said, over his shoulder. “Maybe it’s just as well I don’t find it, poor old feller.”