"I woke up in the night, and I looked out," he would say. "Everybody was sleepin' and I crept over to the window. It was raining like"—here grandfather's long list of comparisons failed, and he described it simply—"it was just rain and storm and marchin'. They kept going and going. It was tramp, tramp all night."
"Didn't anybody speak, grandfather?" the children would ask.
"You couldn't hear 'em for the rain," he would answer. "Once in a while you could hear 'em cryin'. But most of the time it was just rain and storm, rain and storm. They couldn't go fast, they—"
"Why didn't our boys catch them?" little Caleb always asked. "I'd 'a' run after them."
"Our boys was tired." Grandfather dismissed the Union army with one short sentence. "The rebels kept droppin' in their tracks. There was two dead front of the porch in the morning, and three across the bridge. I tried to sneak out in the night and give 'em something to eat, or ask some of 'em to come in, but the folks said I was too sick. They wouldn't let me go. I—"
"It would 'a' been a nice thing to help the enemies of your country that you'd been fightin' against!" Henrietta would sometimes say scornfully.
"You didn't see 'em marchin' and hear the sick ones cryin' when the rain held up a little," he reminded Henrietta. "Oh, I wish I'd sneaked out and done something for 'em!"
Then he would lapse into silence, his eyes on the long, red road which led to Hagerstown. It lay now clear and hot and treeless in the sunshine; to his vision, however, the dust was whipped into deep mud by a beating rain, beneath which Lee and his army "marched and marched." He leaned forward as though straining to see.
"I saw some flags once when it lightened," he said; "and once I thought I saw General Lee."
"Oh, I guess not!" Henrietta would answer with scornful indulgence to which grandfather was deaf.
He read the newspaper announcement of the encampment again and again, then he went to meet the children on their way from school, stopping to tell their father, who was at work in the field.
"There'll be a grand review," grandfather said. "Ten thousand soldiers in line. We'll go to it, John. It'll be a great day for the young ones."
He was a brisk, energetic man, too busy to be always patient.