A Clean Hand

They gave the page back to him at four in the afternoon, with a stroke of blue pencil across it.

"Do it again."

Josiah Bell took the sheet and looked. There were ninety-one lines on that page, ninety-one names, each with a date, a regiment or a town, a destination, a reason. He went over them twice before he found it: line sixty-three, he had written Havre de Grace, then gone back over the stroke of the H because the ink had gone pale, and the correction had made a thickness.

A thickness.