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a time of smoky campfires and rain falling unregarded on the eyes of the dead, men nodding in comatose sleep with their socks over their rifle muzzles. Hospital tents smelling of dirty flesh and excrement. He had come back amazed at the cleanliness he had always taken
    for granted. The spotless, ironed cuffs of the men before him. His own spotless ironed cuffs. The clean suits and the noiseless room, a shining wood floor and the sparkling glass of the lamp chimney. Everybody’s shoes of unbroken leather and two pairs of whole shoe- laces. “Is this supposed to be good for me or good for the Indians?” “The Indians,” said Dr. Reed. “God is asking thee to serve yet
    more.”
    “Who else from the Friends?”
    “Two, both in Indian Territory. Kansas and the area they call Oklahoma.”
    Samuel shook his head. “I must look to the future.”
    He was on the very edge of saying something more, that some- day he would marry and have a family and must think about pro- viding for them. But Peter Simons, the red-cheeked and glistening draper with his sober-colored, rich coat, his spiky white forelock, was the grandfather of a young woman who a year ago had sent Samuel’s ring back to him. This because he had volunteered as an ambulance driver. Her letter was acerbic and replete with single and double underlinings on such phrases as the sinfulness of supporting this barbaric war in any way and I see you have abandoned your Quaker upbringing to aid and comfort those who fly in the face of God’s com- mandments. Quakers had the gift of making people uncomfortable. Especially other Quakers. Especially himself. He would have said the same thing two years ago.
    Peter Simons knew what he had been about to say and slowly closed his eyes and then turned to the library fire and opened them again on the red piling of coals. He ran his hand through his spiking snow-white hair. Simons was her grandparent and could not tell the little beast to keep her opinions to herself.
    There was something more that no one was saying. Samuel waited them out. He waited, and so did they, in the comfortable sort of silence to which they had all become accustomed. Four of them because they were Friends, and Lewis Henry Morgan because he had spent so many years traveling among the Seneca, the Ojibway, the Sioux, the Crow, and the Mandan, people who often sat in total
    silence, like a species of violence-prone Quakers, while thoughts and images streamed through their minds. The Indians seeking a sign from their dream spirit and Friends waiting for the Inner Light.
    The door creaked open, and the young butler tilted forward into the room and straightened himself smartly with a chair back.
    “There’s lamb,” he said. “And tea and all.”
    Joseph Kane sat back so that the butler and another serving-man could lay his plate of lamb in front of him. Kane shifted and tugged down his brown coat sleeve and seemed about to say something but then didn’t. He touched his watch in its watch pocket in a habitual, compulsive gesture. His mind seemed to tick over like the works of his timepiece.
    Dr. Reed talked about the new Indian Bureau. He ate sparingly. Who could keep an eye on what was happening in the distant western lands when Atlanta was burning and a million freed black slaves were following the Union armies and men were dying by the thousands all over the South? It was not the kind of thing that had a high priority in 1865.
    He spoke of the incredible corruption in the Office of Indian Affairs and what had happened to the men who ran it.
    Nothing. Nothing, not a thing. Nobody was ever charged. They promised the red men clothes and they sent out two hundred men’s summer suits and every one of them was large enough for a three- hundred-pound man, and so the Indians cut the sleeves from them and made leggings for the children. They had sent flour that was full of weevils and bacon that had turned green and portable soup in chunks that boiled up into