Jimmie was distracted.  He grabbed the lantern from the other man, and ran this way and that, looking for some of the familiar landmarks of his home—­the chicken-house, the pig-sty, the back fence with the broken elm tree in the corner, the railroad beyond.  He could not believe that he had come to the place at all—­he could not credit the reality of such nightmare sights as his eyes reported to him.  He rushed about, stumbling over mountains of upheaved brown dirt, sliding down into craters that were filled with a strange, penetrating odour which caused his eyes to smart; and then clambering out again and running after men with lanterns, shouting questions at them and not waiting for an answer.  It seemed to him that if he ran just a little farther he must surely find the house and the other things he was looking for; but he found nothing but more craters and more mountains of dirt; and little by little the horrible truth became clear to him, that all the way down the railroad track, as far as he could see or run, this gigantic trough extended, a valley of raw dirt with mountains on each side, crowned here and there with wheels and axles and iron trucks of blown-up freight-cars, and filled in the bottom with the deadly fumes of trinitrotoluol!

Jimmie cried out to the men and women with lanterns, asking had they seen his wife and babies.  But no one had seen them—­no one had notified them of the impending explosion!  Jimmie was sobbing, calling out distractedly; he ran out to the road, and after much searching found a charred tree-stump which gave him his precise bearings, so that he knew where the house should have been, and could assure himself that it was precisely where that frightful slope started down into the abyss.  He slid around on this slope, calling aloud, as if he expected the spirits of his loved ones might have remained there, defying all the power of suddenly expanding gases.  He ran back across the road and called, as if they might have fled that way.

At last he ran into Mr. Drew; old Mr. Drew, who a couple of weeks before had taken Eleeza Betooser and her three little ones driving in his buggy!  That memory was the nearest Jimmie could get to them, and so he clutched the old soldier’s arm, and held on to it, weeping like a little child.

The old man tried to draw him away, to get him to his home.  But Jimmie must stay on the spot, he was held by a spell of horror.  He wandered about, dragging Mr. Drew with him, pleading with people to no purpose; now and then he would break out with curses against war-makers, and especially those who made explosives and transported them in freight-trains through other men’s back-yards.  For once people heard him without threats of lynching.