The situation was a simple one, and yet it had suddenly become impossible to him. He, Brent Maxwell, landowner, dealer in farm properties, had come to present an official paper for signature. He had done it scores of times, and yet the usual conversation with which custom softens the unpleasant alternatives of business failure into kindly and courteous agreement had become suddenly a way of pain—a chapter of indefinable reproach. A look of vacant, yellow eyes, grown steadfast, was making this hour one of loathing and horror.

As the last words were spoken and the necessary signatures were affixed, he snatched the papers from the lawyer’s hands, crushed them into his pocket, and in sudden revulsion, his tense nerves released, sprang to his feet.

The effect upon the huddled figure opposite him was instantaneous and terrible. It cringed backward, with a shrinking gesture of fear and agony. Its palsied arms, shaking and uncertain, wavered before its face. A shriek came from its lips, but this time not the monotonous, wordless wail of habit, but an articulate cry:

“My God! My head! Don’t strike me again!”

Maxwell dimly heard the sobbing cry with which the sister’s arms went round the cowering, abject figure, and the lawyer’s abrupt ejaculation of astonishment and reassurance, as he rushed to the door and flung himself out into the frosty evening. His breath was coming heavily, and his fingers worked nervously in and out of clinched fists. As the sky opened before him, a vision hurled itself with the appalling directness of a thunderbolt before him—a vision of an acre of bloody, trampled sward, iron-sown, and blue with pungent wreaths of smoke. In the foreground a dismantled gun, prone upon whose stock a figure lay, with blackened face and tattered grey uniform, and over it a second figure swinging a clubbed musket, remorselessly cruel with the lust of war. The crest of that spattered knoll strewn with quiet forms—these two alone fiercely erect. Then the clubbed weapon descended. From the limp figure stretched across the gun rose two protesting arms; two hazel eyes looked from beneath the bloody mat of hair, and a voice shrill and terrifying: “My God! My head! don’t strike me again!”

The vision blurred. Gusts of smoke came in between. Did the blue figure strike again? Did it? Did it?

Maxwell threw his hands toward the night sky that flared with that quick rose of condemnation and died again, as though appealing and inviting doom. The vision had scarce faded into the dim of the early night when the lawyer came down the steps. It was as though he had approached, black-robed and grotesque, from the corner of the dimming picture—a vengeance witnessing and impeaching, binding him, the Brent Maxwell of that savage battery charge, to the Brent Maxwell of this day, a strong man flying from the piteous pallor of a shrunken and deranged wreck.

The one upon whom this sudden panic of soul had crashed like a falling tower gripped him fiercely by the arms. “The man in there,” he said hoarsely, “the man with the blue face and yellow eyes—the man that looked at me! Did you see him look at me?”

The other shrank back half fearfully. “Why, Maxwell,” he said, “what’s the matter? It was merely a fit of some sort. I thought you knew he was crazy. Why, man, you’re shaking! Come along and we’ll get something to warm us up.”

“Did you see him put up his hands?”

The lawyer drew away his arm almost angrily. “Heavens!” he said, “you’re almost as bad as the old man himself. He’s crazy, I tell you, plumb crazy, and has been ever since they brought him home from the war. He was struck in the head by a shell or something.”

“Yes, yes. Where? Where was it? What battle was it?”