"So you did!" she whispered; "so you did!"
Mary Bowman clasped her hands and looked about her, down the street, out toward the Seminary, back at the grim trees. The little sounds had died away; there was now a mighty stillness.
"He said the whole Army of the Potomac," she repeated. "John is in the Army of the Potomac."
"That is what he said," answered the Irishwoman.
"What will the Deemers do?" cried Mary Bowman. "And the Wilsons?"
Suddenly Mary Bowman lifted her hands above her head.
"What?" cried Hannah Casey. "What is it?"
Mary Bowman went backwards toward the door, her eyes still fixed on the distant ridge, as though they could not be torn away. It was nine o'clock; a shrill little clock in the house struck the hour.
"Children!" called Mary Bowman. "Come! See!"
The children dropped the little sticks with which they played and ran to her.
Mary Bowman lifted the little boy to her shoulder. A strange, unaccountable excitement possessed her, she hardly knew what she was doing. She wondered what a battle would be like. She did not think of wounds, or of blood or of groans, but of great sounds, of martial music, of streaming flags carried aloft. She sometimes dreamed that her husband, though he had so unimportant a place, might perform some great deed of valor, might snatch the colors from a wounded bearer, and lead his regiment to victory upon the field of battle. And now, besides, this moment, he was marching home! She never thought that he might die, that he might be lost, swallowed up in the yawning mouth of some great battle-trench; she never dreamed that she would never see him again, would hunt for him among thousands of dead bodies, would have her eyes filled with sights intolerable, with wretchedness unspeakable, would be tortured by a thousand agonies which she could not assuage, torn by a thousand griefs beside her own. She could not foresee that all the dear woods and fields which she loved, where she had played as a child, where she had picnicked as a girl, where she had walked with her lover as a young woman, would become, from Round Top to the Seminary, from the Seminary to Culp's Hill, a great shambles, then a great charnel-house. She lifted the little boy to her shoulder and held him aloft.