This was Virginia.

He looked out of the tent at the company street. The rain dripped on the freezing loblolly of the street. Beyond that misty gray of the rain, he saw the stretching hutment, low diminutive log cabins, chinked with mud, with doorways a man would have to crouch to get through, with roofs of tenting laid over boughs or boards from hardtack boxes, or fence rails, with cranky chimneys of sticks and dried mud. The chimney of the hut across from him was surmounted by a beef barrel with ends knocked out. In this heavy air, however, that device did not seem to help. The smoke from that chimney rose as sluggishly as smoke from any other, and hung as sadly in the drizzle, creeping back down along the sopping canvas of the roof.

Over the door was a board with large, inept lettering: Home Sweet Home. This was the hut of Simms Purdew, the hero.

The men were huddled in those lairs. Adam knew the names of some. He knew the faces of all, hairy or shaven, old or young, fat or thin, suffering or hardened, sad or gay, good or bad. When they stood about his tent, chaffing each other, exchanging their obscenities, cursing command or weather, he had studied their faces. He had had the need to understand what life lurked behind the mask of flesh, behind the oath, the banter, the sadness. Once covertly looking at Simms Purdew, the only man in the world whom he hated, he had seen the heavy, slack, bestubbled jaw open and close to emit the cruel, obscene banter, and had seen the pale blue eyes go watery with whisky and merriment, and suddenly he was not seeing the face of that vile creature. He was seeing, somehow, the face of a young boy, the boy Simms Purdew must once have been, a boy with sorrel hair, and blue eyes dancing with gaiety, and the boy mouth grinning trustfully among the freckles.