Elijah flung the reins around the whip-stock, and climbed out. He stared up at the crazily laden wagon; wild eyes blinked down. “What’s the matter?” Doc called past him.

“Rebels!” bellowed the farmer. Saliva dripped from the corners of his straw-colored beard.

Elijah saw the blue-green world skating past him in a tilted whirl. “Where? The rebels … where?”

“To Jambersburg they come at night. I guess is maybe millions: they take my colt, they kill the kelver!”

A woman wailed: “And jickens they kill. Maybe they burn our house down once—”

Duffey had joined Elijah in the road … They stood there marvelling, listening, letting old man Kaufman die unaided … The straw-bearded man—his name was Christian Zeigenfuss, and he said he had a son in the One Hundred Forty-eighth P.V.—was quite mad with horror. His farm was four miles from Chambersburg; in the first blackness of the previous evening, the family had looked out and seen a host of dark horsemen rush into their yard. More came, and more; the lane was choked with them. They wanted water and food, and they paid with great wads of ragged paper which could never be money. They talked in a strange way; they wore torn brown shirts; they were rebels. Yes, they had taken his colt—it was a fine sorrel colt, worth a fortune. And after the whole posse moved on, a party of three men had come back and killed two calves. They killed them and bled them and cut them up by the light of a burning brush-pile, before the eyes of Mr. Zeigenfuss. Yes, and chickens—how many, he did not know.

Perhaps within a few hours the rebels would return; they might have learned in Chambersburg that young Dias Zeigenfuss was a Union soldier, and then they might kill the whole family … The farmer’s tribe packed as many valuables as they could muster, into this wagon. They fled. The world was ending, outrageously, all around them. Ach, yes, Chambersburg had been burned. They looked back and saw vast red flares against the sky. Other people with faster horses had passed them, but must have turned off somewhere along the way. Mrs. Zeigenfuss had a brother who lived near Hanover; perhaps the rebels would not find them there. Millions of rebels. They laughed while they killed the poor kelver. They had guns, and most of them wore two pistols. One man, cried the pale thirteen-year-old, had no less than four pistols. And Chambersburg must have been burned; probably every soul there had been killed. There were enormous pink spots in the sky—