almost unmanageable gray. He heard a throbbing roll, as of drums, which he identified as the blood beating in his ears. The saber-hilt was slippery with the sweat of his palm.
He knew that he was afraid, and did not relish the knowledge. Stubbornly he turned his boot-toes forward, and approached the fallen ranks of the enemy. The drums in his ears beat a cadence for his lone march.
He reached and stood over the nearest of the bodies. A blue-bloused infantryman this, melted over on his face, his hands slack upon the musket lying crosswise beneath him. The peaked forage cap had fallen from rumpled, bright hair. The cheek, what Paradine could see of it, was as downy as a peach. Only a kid, young to die; but was he dead?
There was no sign of a wound. Too, a certain waxy finality was lacking in that slumped posture. Paradine extended the point of his saber and gingerly prodded a sun-reddened wrist.
No response. Paradine increased the pressure. A red drop appeared under the point, and grew. Paradine scowled. The boy could bleed. He must be alive, after all.
“Wake up, Yankee,” said Joseph Paradine, and stirred the blue flank with his foot. The flesh yielded, but did not stir otherwise. He turned the body over. A vacant pink face stared up out of eyes that were fixed, but bright. Not death—and not sleep.
Paradine had seen men in a swoon who looked like that. Yet even swooners breathed, and there was not a hair’s line of motion under the dimmed brass buttons.
“Funny,” thought Paradine, not meaning that he was amused. He walked on, because there was nothing left to do. Just beyond that first fallen lad lay the rest of the patrol, still in the diamond-shaped formation they mast have held when awake and erect. One man lay at the right side of the street, another opposite him at the left. The corporal was in the center and, to his rear, another private.
The corporal was, or had been, an excitable man. His hands clutched his musket firmly, his lips drew back from gritted teeth, his eyes were narrow instead of staring. A bit of awareness seemed to remain upon the set, stubbly face. Paradine forbore to prod him with the saber, but stooped and twitched up an eyelid. It snapped back into its squint. The corporal, too, lived but did not move.
“Wake up,” Paradine urged him, as he had urged the boy. “You aren’t dead.” He straightened up, and stared at the more distant and numerous blue bodies in their fallen ranks. “None of you are dead!” he protested at the top of his lungs, unable to beat down his hysteria. “Wake up, Yankees!”
He was pleading with them to rise, even though he would be doomed if they did.
“Yee-hee!” he yelled. "You’re all my prisoners! Up on your feet!”
“Yo’re wastin’ yore breath, son.”
Paradine whirled like a top to face this sudden quiet rebuke.
A man stood in the front yard of a shabby house opposite, leaning on a picket fence. Paradine’s first impression was of noble and vigorous old age, for a mighty cascade of white beard covered the speaker’s chest, and his brow was fringed with thick cottony hair. But next moment Paradine saw that the brow was strangely narrow and sunken, that the mouth in the midst of its hoary ambush hung wryly slack, and that the eyes were bright but empty, like cheap imitation jewels.
The stranger moved slowly along the fence until he came to a gate. He pushed it creakily open, and moved across the dusty road toward Paradine. His body and legs were meager, even for an old man,
