He sat at Pentland Bale’s desk and tried to write a letter to Lucas Mite in Minnesota. But the letter was flimsy, a puny recounting, not at all the sort of a letter Mite would expect … Doctor Duffey, he thought. No, he’s busy enough; I shan’t bother him. Hud will be drilling with those youngsters, or God knows what. And no one moves, over at the Fanning house. The place is bewitched. Only Cybo goes jangling across the pasture with his idiotic bell; he trots under bushes and prowls in the brown timothy, and lies in the hot sun and lets flies bite him …

Room after room, all empty, all grotesque and stolid and inhabited by unfriendly presences. The day was stifling. He took off his shirt and tramped up and down the stairs, trying to make vague errands for himself. At four o’clock he had what he thought was a very good idea. He lifted the trap door in the kitchen floor and crawled down into the pit beneath, hunting for whiskey. He found it: a keg. Pentland Bale had declared that it was an improvement on the old-time Monongahela … Dan filled a decanter and carried it up to his room. He read Meister Eckhart and Coleridge. He read two copies of Arthur’s Home Magazine … Later he drank more whiskey and was moderately sick. Over behind the seminary someone kept shooting with a musket. Practising marksmanship, learning how to kill a man. The wide reports rolled in, round and precise and portentous, until dusk put an end to them, and boys began to halloo up and down the Springs road.

Then he had been asleep and he slid up out of hot darkness because a voice was calling him. “Hey—” a man wailing at him, over and over, “Hey … hey, Dan!” Dan shook himself; his lead body became bristling to life. He got up and crept to the window. There was a black smudge against the dimness below, and that smudge was Elijah. “Hello,” he croaked to the smudge.

“I didn’t expect you’d be asleep,” Huddlestone said.

“No, I wasn’t … I guess I was, too.”

“I’m very sorry. But I wanted—”

Dan told him, “Come upstairs. The door is unlatched.” While he lit the lamp, he could hear Elijah poking cautiously up the long stairway. Dan opened the door … Hud was in his shirt-sleeves, and bareheaded. He looked at Dan. “Why, you didn’t take off your clothes when you went to bed.”

“No,” Bale said. He slouched back loosely on the bed. “Liquor’s over there on the table. Help yourself.”

Elijah grinned. “Drinking all by yourself? That is odd. I didn’t know you drank much at all.”

“I don’t.”

Huddlestone took the glass stopper out of the decanter, hesitated, and dropped it in again. “I want to tell you: it looks like we’re going.”

“Going—where?”