Union soldiers. Paradine gazed back into the silence-brimmed valley, then at what he still held in his right hand. It was the Poiu-Wows book, marked with a wet capital J in his own blood.
What had Teague insisted? The one whose name had been invoked would be fatally angry if his help were refused. But Paradine was going to refuse it.
He turned to Page 60. His voice was shaky, but be managed to read aloud:
“Ye horsemen and footmen, conjured here at this time, ye may pass on in the name of”—he faltered, but disregarded the ink-blotting, and the substituted names—“of Jesus Christ, and through the word of God.”
Again he gulped, and finished. “Ye may now ride on and pass.”
From under his feet burst a dry, startling thunder of sound, a partridge rising to the sky. Farther down the slope a crow took wing, cawing querulously. Wind wakened in the Channow Valley; Paradine saw the distant trees of the town stir with it. Then a confused din came to his ears, as though something besides wind was wakening.
After a moment he heard the notes of a bugle, shrill and tremulous, sounding an alarm.
Paradine struck fire, and built it up with fallen twigs. Into the hottest heart of it he thrust Teague’s book of charms. The flame gnawed eagerly at it, the pages crumpled and fanned and blackened with the heat. For a moment he saw, standing out among charred fragments, a blood-red J, his writing, as though it fought for life. Then it, too, was consumed, and there were only ashes. Before the last red tongue subsided, his ears picked up a faint rebel yell, and afar into the valley rode Confederate cavalry.
He put his gray to the gallop, got down the slope and joined his regiment before it reached the town. On the street a Union line was forming. There was hot, fierce fighting, such as had scattered and routed many a Northern force.
But, at the end of it, the Southerners ran like foxes before hounds, and those who escaped counted themselves lucky.
In his later garrulous years, Joseph Paradine was apt to say that the war was lost, not at Antietam or Gettysburg, but at a little valley hamlet called Channow. Refusal of a certain alliance, he would insist, was the cause; that offered ally fought thenceforth against the South.
But nobody paid attention, except to laugh or to pity. So many veterans go crazy.
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