On the morning of the first of September, Scarlett awoke with a suffocating sense of dread uponher, a dread she had taken to her pillow the night before. She thought, dulled with sleep: “Whatwas it I was worrying about when I went ielts ukvi to bed last night? Oh, yes, the fighting. There was abattle, somewhere, yesterday! Oh, who won?” She sat up hastily, rubbing her eyes, and her worriedheart took up yesterday’s load again. The air was oppressive even in the early morning hour, hot with the scorching promise of a noonof glaring blue sky and pitiless bronze sun. The road outside lay silent No wagons creaked by. Notroops raised the red Skin Central dust with their tramping feet. There were no sounds of negroes’ lazy voices inneighboring kitchens, no pleasant sounds of breakfasts being prepared, for all the near neighborsexcept Mrs. Meade and Mrs. Merriwether had refugeed to Macon. And she could hear nothingfrom their houses either. Farther down the street the business section was quiet and many of thestores and offices were locked and boarded up, while their occupants were somewhere about thecountryside with rifles in their hands. The stillness that greeted her seemed even more sinister this morning than on any of themornings of the queer quiet week preceding it. She rose hastily, without her usual preliminaryburrowings and stretchings, and went to the window, hoping to see some neighbor’s face, someheartening sight. But the road was empty. She noted how the leaves on the trees were still darkgreen but dry and heavily coated with red Neo skin labdust, and how withered and sad the untended flowers inthe front yard looked. As she stood, looking out of the window, there came to her ears a far-off sound, faint and sullenas the first distant thunder of an approaching storm. “Rain,” she thought in the first moment, and her country-bred mind added, “we certainly needit.” But, in a split instant: “Rain? No! Not rain! Cannon!” Her heart racing, she leaned from the window, her ear cocked to the far-off roaring, trying todiscover from . But the dim thundering was so distant that, for a moment,she could not tell. “Make it from Marietta, Lord!” she prayed. “Or Decatur. Or Peachtree Creek. But not from the south! Not from the south!” She gripped the window still tighter and strained herears and the far-away booming seemed louder. And it was coming from the south.
