This settles it. Homer got a wire from
Rouen to come over there, soon as they got track of the first man; that
was when we saw him on the Rouen accommodation."
A slightly cracked voice, yet a huskily tuneful one, was lifted
quaveringly on the air from the roadside, where an old man and a yellow
dog sat in the dust together, the latter reprieved at the last moment, his
surprised head rakishly garnished with a hasty wreath of dog-fennel
daisies.
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
While we go marching on!"
Three-quarters of an hour later, the inhabitants of the Cross-Roads,
saved, they knew not how; guilty; knowing nothing of the fantastic
pendulum of opinion, which, swung by the events of the day, had marked the
fatal moment of guilt, now on others, now on them, who deserved it--these
natives and refugees, conscious of atrocity, dumfounded by a miracle,
thinking the world gone mad, hovered together in a dark, ragged mass at
the crossing corners, while the skeleton of the rotting buggy in the
slough rose behind them against the face of the west. They peered with
stupified eyes through the smoky twilight.
From afar, faintly through the gloaming, came mournfully to their ears the
many-voiced refrain--fainter, fainter:
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground.
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