Two brothers alone, two marks

Alone on the Connecticut farm, Charles works himself into exhaustion and visits the girls Mr. Edwards circulates through the rooms above Mr. Hallam's inn, two weeks at a time. Prising at a boulder, he lets the crowbar slip and takes a long tear across his forehead; the scar heals dark brown and he comes to hate it — "it looks like somebody marked me like a cow". Discharged in 1885, Adam cannot make himself go home: he drifts through Chicago, Buffalo and Niagara Falls, drinks in a bar with a barman nicknamed Cat for his birthmark, and re-enlists rather than face the farm. Summoned to Washington, he finds Cyrus transformed into a great man with a mechanical leg and the ear of the Secretary of War, and refuses West Point to his face. Charles, who had the house scrubbed to the bone for a brother who never arrives, moves back into its filth and makes the farm prosper.

Two solitudes running in parallel, and the pair of marked foreheads that link them. Charles takes his scar fighting a stone as though it were a man; Adam meets a stranger who wears his by birth. The scrubbed house is the chapter's cruelty — Charles prepares for an arrival that never comes, and lets the dirt back in.