“Hell, Back!” drawled one, with a slow grin of disbelief. “You said the same thing afore Chancellorsville, an’all I got from it was a slug of canister in my tail!”—and the others slapped their ragged thighs and shouted.
“Hit’s a-comin’!” Bacchus cried, with a brisk wink, and his seraphic smile, unmoved, untouched, by their derision. “He’ll be here a-judgin’an’decreein’afore the week is over, settin’up His Kingdom, an’sortin’us all out the way it was foretold—the sheep upon His right hand an’the goats upon His left.”
“An’which side are you goin’to be on, Back, when all this sortin’starts?” one drawled with evil innocence. “Are you goin’to be upon the sheep-side or the goat-side?” he demanded.
“Oh,” cried Bacchus cheerfully, with his seraphic smile, “I’ll be upon the sheep-side, brother, with the Chosen of the Lord.”
“Then, Back,” the other slowly answered, “you’d shore God better begin to smell a whole lot better than you do right now, for if the Lord starts sortin’in the dark, Back, He’s goin’to put you where you don’t belong—He’ll have you over thar among the goats!”—and the hot brooding air had rung then with their roars of laughter. Then a word was spoken, an order given, the ragged files trudged on again, and they were gone.
Now this was lost, a fume of smoke, the moment’s image of a fading memory, and he could not say it, speak it, find a word for it—but he could see that boy of his lost youth as he sat round the kitchen table with the rest of them. He could see his cold-grey, restless, unhappy eyes, the strange, gaunt, almost reptilian conformation of his staring face, his incredibly thin, blade-like nose, as he waited there in silence, looking uneasily at the others with his cold-grey, shallow, most unhappy eyes. And the old man seemed to be the spy of destiny, to look at once below the roofs of a million little houses everywhere and on the star-shone, death-flung mystery of the silent battlefield.
He seemed to be a witness of the secret weavings of dark chance that threads our million lives into strange purposes that we do not know. He thought of those dead and wounded men upon the battlefield whose lives would touch his own so nearly, the wounded brother that he knew, the wounded stranger he had seen that day by magic chance, whom he could not forget, and whose life, whose tribe, in the huge abyss and secret purpose of dark time would one day interweave into his own.
Oh, he could not find a word, a phrase to utter it, but he seemed to
