Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 11719-h.htm or 11719-h.zip:
(http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/1/1/7/1/11719/11719-h/11719-h.htm)
or
(http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/1/1/7/1/11719/11719-h.zip)
KINCAID'S BATTERY
BY
GEORGE W. CABLE
1908
ILLUSTRATED BY
ALONZO KIMBALL
[Illustration: "If anyone alive," he cried, "knows any cause why this
thing should not be."]
To
E.C.S.C.
CONTENTS
I. Carrollton Gardens
II. Carriage Company
III. The General's Choice
IV. Manoeuvres
V. Hilary?--Yes, Uncle?
VI. Messrs. Smellemout and Ketchem
VII. By Starlight
VIII. One Killed
IX. Her Harpoon Strikes
X. Sylvia Sighs
XI. In Column of Platoons
XII. Mandeville Bleeds
XIII. Things Anna Could Not Write
XIV. Flora Taps Grandma's Cheek
XV. The Long Month of March
XVI. Constance Tries to Help
XVII. "Oh, Connie, Dear--Nothing--Go On"
XVIII. Flora Tells the Truth!
XIX. Flora Romances
XX. The Fight for the Standard
XXI. Constance Cross-Examines
XXII. Same Story Slightly Warped
XXIII. "Soldiers!"
XXIV. A Parked Battery Can Raise a Dust
XXV. "He Must Wait," Says Anna
XXVI. Swift Going, Down Stream
XXVII. Hard Going, Up Stream
XXVIII. The Cup of Tantalus
XXIX. A Castaway Rose
XXX. Good-by, Kincaid's Battery
XXXI. Virginia Girls and Louisiana Boys
XXXII. Manassas
XXXIII. Letters
XXXIV. A Free-Gift Bazaar
XXXV. The "Sisters of Kincaid's Battery"
XXXVI. Thunder-Cloud and Sunburst
XXXVII. "Till He Said, 'I'm Come Hame, My Love'"
XXXVIII. Anna's Old Jewels
XXXIX. Tight Pinch
XL. The License, The Dagger
XLI. For an Emergency
XLII. "Victory! I Heard it as PI'--"
XLIII. That Sabbath at Shiloh
XLIV. "They Were all Four Together"
XLV. Steve--Maxime--Charlie--
XLVI. The School of Suspense
XLVII. From the Burial Squad
XLVIII. Farragut
XLIX. A City in Terror
L. Anna Amazes Herself
LI. The Callender Horses Enlist
LII. Here They Come
LIII. Ships, Shells, and Letters
LIV. Same April Day Twice
LV. In Darkest Dixie and Out
LVI. Between the Millstones
LVII. Gates of Hell and Glory
LVIII. Arachne
LIX. In a Labyrinth
LX. Hilary's Ghost
LXI. The Flag-of-Truce Boat
LXII. Farewell, Jane!
LXIII. The Iron-clad Oath
LXIV. "Now, Mr. Brick-Mason--"
LXV. Flora's Last Throw
LXVI. "When I Hands in My Checks"
LXVII. Mobile
LXVIII. By the Dawn's Early Light
LXIX. Southern Cross and Northern Star
LXX. Gains and Losses
LXXI. Soldiers of Peace
ILLUSTRATIONS
"If any one alive," he cried, "knows any cause why this thing should not
be"
Anna
"'Tis good-by, Kincaid's Battery"
And the next instant she was in his arms
"No! not under this roof--nor in sight of _these things_."
"You 'ave no ri-ight to leave me! _Ah, you shall not_!"
She dropped into a seat, staring like one demented.
Kincaid's Battery
I
CARROLLTON GARDENS
For the scene of this narrative please take into mind a wide
quarter-circle of country, such as any of the pretty women we are to
know in it might have covered on the map with her half-opened fan.
Let its northernmost corner be Vicksburg, the famous, on the
Mississippi. Let the easternmost be Mobile, and let the most southerly
and by far the most important, that pivotal corner of the fan from which
all its folds radiate and where the whole pictured thing opens and
shuts, be New Orleans. Then let the grave moment that gently ushers us
in be a long-ago afternoon in the Louisiana Delta.
Throughout that land of water and sky the willow clumps dotting the
bosom of every sea-marsh and fringing every rush-rimmed lake were yellow
and green in the full flush of a new year, the war year, 'Sixty-one.
Though rife with warm sunlight, the moist air gave distance and poetic
charm to the nearest and humblest things. At the edges of the great
timbered swamps thickets of young winter-bare cypresses were budding yet
more vividly than the willows, while in the depths of those overflowed
forests, near and far down their lofty gray colonnades, the dwarfed
swamp-maple drooped the winged fruit of its limp bush in pink and
flame-yellow and rose-red masses until it touched its own image in the
still flood.
That which is now only the "sixth district" of greater New Orleans was
then the small separate town of Carrollton. There the vast Mississippi,
leaving the sugar and rice fields of St. Charles and St. John Baptist
parishes and still seeking the Gulf of Mexico, turns from east to south
before it sweeps northward and southeast again to give to the Creole
capital its graceful surname of the "Crescent City." Mile-wide, brimful,
head-on and boiling and writhing twenty fathoms deep, you could easily
have seen, that afternoon, why its turfed levee had to be eighteen feet
high and broad in proportion. So swollen was the flood that from any
deck of a steamboat touching there one might have looked down upon the
whole fair still suburb.
Widely it hovered in its nest of rose gardens, orange groves, avenues of
water-oaks, and towering moss-draped pecans. A few hundred yards from
the levee a slender railway, coming from the city, with a highway on
either side, led into its station-house; but mainly the eye would have
dwelt on that which filled the interval between the nearer high road and
the levee--the "Carrollton Gardens."
At a corner of these grounds closest to the railway station stood a
quiet hotel from whose eastern veranda it was but a step to the centre
of a sunny shell-paved court where two fountains danced and tinkled to
each other. Along its farther bound ran a vine-clad fence where a row of
small tables dumbly invited the flushed visitor to be inwardly cooled.
By a narrow gate in this fence, near its townward end, a shelled walk
lured on into a musky air of verdurous alleys that led and misled,
crossed, doubled, and mazed among flowering shrubs from bower to bower.
Out of sight in there the loiterer came at startling moments face to
face with banks of splendid bloom in ravishing negligee--Diana disrobed,
as it were, while that untiring sensation-hunter, the mocking-bird,
leaped and sang and clapped his wings in a riot of scandalous mirth.
In the ground-floor dining-room of that unanimated hotel sat an old
gentleman named Brodnax, once of the regular army, a retired veteran of
the Mexican war, and very consciously possessed of large means. He sat
quite alone, in fine dress thirty years out of fashion, finishing a late
lunch and reading a newspaper; a trim, hale man not to be called old in
his own hearing. He had read everything intended for news or
entertainment and was now wandering in the desert of the advertising
columns, with his mind nine miles away, at the other end of New Orleans.
Although not that person whom numerous men of his acquaintance had begun
affectionately to handicap with the perilous nickname of "the ladies'
man," he was thinking of no less than five ladies; two of one name and
three of another. Flora Valcour and her French grandmother (as well as
her brother of nineteen, already agog to be off in the war) had but
lately come to New Orleans, from Mobile. On a hilly border of that
smaller Creole city stood the home they had left, too isolated, with war
threatening, for women to occupy alone. Mrs. Callender was the young
widow of this old bachelor's life-long friend, the noted judge of that
name, then some two years deceased. Constance and Anna were her
step-daughters, the latter (if you would believe him) a counterpart of
her long-lost, beautiful mother, whose rejection of the soldier's suit,
when he was a mere lieutenant, was the well-known cause of his
singleness. These Callender ladies, prompted by him and with a sweet
modesty of quietness, had just armed a new field battery with its six
splendid brass guns, and it was around these three Callenders that his
ponderings now hung; especially around Anna and in reference to his much
overprized property and two nephews: Adolphe Irby, for whom he had
obtained the command of this battery, which he was to see him drill this
afternoon, and Hilary Kincaid, who had himself cast the guns and who was
to help the senior cousin conduct these evolutions.
The lone reader's glance loitered down a long row of slim paragraphs,
each beginning with the same wee picture of a steamboat whether it
proclaimed the _Grand Duke_ or the _Louis d'Or_, the _Ingomar_ bound for
the "Lower Coast," or the _Natchez_ for "Vicksburg and the Bends."
Shifting the page, he read of the Swiss Bell-Ringers as back again
"after a six years' absence," and at the next item really knew what he
read. It was of John Owens' appearance, every night, as _Caleb Plummer_
in "Dot," "performance to begin at seven o'clock." Was it there Adolphe
would this evening take his party, of which the dazzling Flora would be
one and Anna, he hoped, another? He had proposed this party to Adolphe,
agreeing to bear its whole cost if the nephew would manage to include in
it Anna and Hilary. And Irby had duly reported complete success and
drawn on him, but the old soldier still told his doubts to the
newspaper.
"Adolphe has habits," he meditated, "but success is not one of them."
Up and down a perpendicular procession on the page he every now and then
mentally returned the salute of the one little musketeer of the same
height as the steamboat's chimneys, whether the Attention he challenged
was that of the Continentals, the Louisiana Grays, Orleans Cadets,
Crescent Blues or some other body of blithe invincibles. Yet his thought
was still of Anna. When Adolphe, last year, had courted her, and the
hopeful uncle had tried non-intervention, she had declined him--"and oh,
how wisely!" For then back to his native city came Kincaid after years
away at a Northern military school and one year across the ocean, and
the moment the uncle saw him he was glad Adolphe had failed. But now if
she was going to find Hilary as light-headed and cloying as Adolphe was
thick-headed and sour, or if she must see Hilary go soft on the slim
Mobile girl--whom Adolphe was already so torpidly enamored
of--"H-m-m-m!"
Two young men who had tied their horses behind the hotel crossed the
white court toward the garden. They also were in civil dress, yet wore
an air that goes only with military training. The taller was Hilary
Kincaid, the other his old-time, Northern-born-and-bred school chum,
Fred Greenleaf. Kincaid, coming home, had found him in New Orleans, on
duty at Jackson Barracks, and for some weeks they had enjoyed cronying.
Now they had been a day or two apart and had chanced to meet again at
this spot. Kincaid, it seems, had been looking at a point hard by with a
view to its fortification. Their manner was frankly masterful though
they spoke in guarded tones.
"No," said Kincaid, "you come with me to this drill. Nobody'll take
offence."
"Nor will you ever teach your cousin to handle a battery," replied
Greenleaf, with a sedate smile.
"Well, he knows things we'll never learn. Come with me, Fred, else I
can't see you till theatre's out--if I go there with her--and you say--"
"Yes, I want you to go with her," murmured Greenleaf, so solemnly that
Kincaid laughed outright.
"But, after the show, of course," said the laugher, "you and I'll ride,
eh?" and then warily, "You've taken your initials off all your stuff?...
Yes, and Jerry's got your ticket. He'll go down with your things, check
them all and start off on the ticket himself. Then, as soon as you--"
"But will they allow a slave to do so?"
"With my pass, yes; 'Let my black man, Jerry--'"
The garden took the pair into its depths a moment too soon for the old
soldier to see them as he came out upon the side veranda with a cloud on
his brow that showed he had heard his nephew's laugh.
II
CARRIAGE COMPANY
Bareheaded the uncle crossed the fountained court, sat down at a table
and read again. In the veranda a negro, his own slave, hired to this
hotel, held up an elegant military cap, struck an inquiring attitude,
and called softly, "Gen'al?"
"Bring it with the coffee."
But the negro instantly brought it without the coffee and placed it on
the table with a delicate flourish, shuffled a step back and bowed low:
"Coffee black, Gen'al, o' co'se?"
"Black as your grandmother."
The servant tittered: "Yas, suh, so whah it flop up-siden de cup it
leave a lemon-yalleh sta-ain."
He capered away, leaving the General to the little steamboats and to a
blessed ignorance of times to be when at "Vicksburg and the Bends" this
same waiter would bring his coffee made of corn-meal bran and muddy
water, with which to wash down scant snacks of mule meat. The listless
eye still roamed the arid page as the slave returned with the fragrant
pot and cup, but now the sitter laid it by, lighted a cigar and mused:--
In this impending war the South would win, of course--oh, God is just!
But this muser could only expect to fall at the front. Then his large
estate, all lands and slaves, five hundred souls--who would inherit that
and hold it together? Held together it must be! Any partition of it
would break no end of sacredly humble household and family ties and
work spiritual havoc incalculable. There must be but one heir. Who?
Hilary's mother had been in heaven these many years, the mother of
Adolphe eighteen months; months quite enough to show the lone brother
how vast a loss is the absence of the right mistress from such very
human interests as those of a great plantation. Not only must there be
but one heir, but he _must have the right wife_.
The schemer sipped. So it was Anna for Hilary if he could bring it
about. So, too, it must be Hilary for his adjutant-general, to keep him
near enough to teach him the management of the fortune coming to him if
he, Hilary, would only treat his kind uncle's wishes--reasonably. With
the cup half lifted he harkened. From a hidden walk and bower close on
the garden side of this vine-mantled fence sounded footsteps and voices:
"But, Fred! where on earth did she get--let's sit in here--get that
rich, belated, gradual smile?"
A memory thrilled the listening General. "From her mother," thought he,
and listened on.
"It's like," continued his nephew--"I'll tell you what it's like. It's
like--Now, let me alone! You see, one has to _learn_ her beauty--by
degrees. You know, there _is_ a sort of beauty that flashes on you at
first sight, like--like the blaze of a ball-room. I was just now
thinking of a striking instance--"
"From Mobile? You always are."
"No such thing! Say, Fred, I'll tell you what Miss Anna's smile is like.
It's as if you were trying--say in a telescope--for a focus, and at last
all at once it comes and--there's your star!"
The Northerner softly assented.
"Fred! Fancy Flora Valcour with that smile!"
"No! Hilary Kincaid, I think you were born to believe in every feminine
creature God ever made. No wonder they nickname you as they do. Now,
some girls are quite too feminine for me."
In his own smoke the General's eyes opened aggressively. But hark! His
nephew spoke again:
"Fred, if you knew all that girl has done for that boy and that
grandmother--It may sound like an overstatement, but you must have
observed--"
"That she's a sort of overstatement herself?"
"Go to grass! _Your_ young lady's not even an understatement; she's only
a profound pause. See here! what time is it? I prom--"
On the uncle's side of the fence a quick step brought a newcomer, a
Creole of maybe twenty-nine years, member of his new staff, in bright
uniform:
"Ah, Général, yo' moze ob-edient! Never less al-lone then when al-lone?
'T is the way with myseff--"
He seemed not unrefined, though of almost too mettlesome an eye; in
length of leg showing just the lack, in girth of waist just the excess,
to imply a better dignity on horseback and to allow a proud tailor to
prove how much art can overcome. Out on the road a liveried black
coachman had halted an open carriage, in which this soldier had arrived
with two ladies. Now these bowed delightedly from it to the General,
while Kincaid and his friend stood close hid and listened agape, equally
amused and dismayed.
"How are you, Mandeville?" said the General. "I am not nearly as much
alone as I seem, sir!"
A voice just beyond the green-veiled fence cast a light on this reply
and brought a flush to the Creole's very brows. "Alas! Greenleaf," it
cried, "we search in vain! He is not here! We are even more alone than
we seem! Ah! where is that peerless chevalier, my beloved, accomplished,
blameless, sagacious, just, valiant and amiable uncle? Come let us press
on. Let not the fair sex find him first and snatch him from us forever!"
The General's scorn showed only in his eyes as they met the blaze of
Mandeville's. "You were about to remark--?" he began, but rose and
started toward the carriage.
There not many minutes later you might have seen the four men amicably
gathered and vying in clever speeches to pretty Mrs. Callender and her
yet fairer though less scintillant step-daughter Anna.
III
THE GENERAL'S CHOICE
Anna Callender. In the midst of the gay skirmish and while she yielded
Greenleaf her chief attention, Hilary observed her anew.
What he thought he saw was a golden-brown profusion of hair with a
peculiar richness in its platted coils, an unconsciously faultless poise
of head, and, equally unconscious, a dreamy softness of sweeping lashes.
As she laughed with the General her student noted further what seemed to
him a rare silkiness in the tresses, a vapory lightness in the short
strands that played over the outlines of temple and forehead, and the
unstudied daintiness with which they gathered into the merest mist of a
short curl before her exquisite ear.
[Illustration: Anna]
But when now she spoke with him these charms became forgettable as he
discovered, or fancied he did, in her self-oblivious eyes, a depth of
thought and feeling not in the orbs alone but also in the brows and
lids, and between upper and under lashes as he glimpsed them in profile
while she turned to Mandeville. And now, unless his own insight misled
him, he observed how unlike those eyes, and yet how subtly mated with
them, was her mouth; the delicate rising curve of the upper lip, and the
floral tenderness with which it so faintly overhung the nether,
wherefrom it seemed ever about to part yet parted only when she spoke or
smiled.
"A child's mouth and a woman's eyes," he mused.
When her smiles came the mouth remained as young as before,
yet suddenly, as truly as the eyes, showed--showed him at
least--steadfastness of purpose, while the eyes, where fully
half the smile was, still unwittingly revealed their depths of truth.
"Poor Fred!" he pondered as the General and Mandeville entered the
carriage and it turned away.
A mile or two from Carrollton down the river and toward the city lay the
old unfenced fields where Hilary had agreed with Irby to help him
manoeuvre his very new command. Along the inland edge of this plain the
railway and the common road still ran side by side, but the river veered
a mile off. So Mandeville pointed out to the two ladies as they, he, and
the General drove up to the spot with Kincaid and Greenleaf as
outriders. The chosen ground was a level stretch of wild turf maybe a
thousand yards in breadth, sparsely dotted with shoulder-high acacias.
No military body was yet here, and the carriage halted at the first good
view point.
Mrs. Callender, the only member of her family who was of Northern birth
and rearing, was a small slim woman whose smile came whenever she spoke
and whose dainty nose went all to merry wrinkles whenever she smiled. It
did so now, in the shelter of her diminutive sunshade opened flat
against its jointed handle to fend off the strong afternoon beams, while
she explained to Greenleaf--dismounted beside the wheels with
Mandeville--that Constance, Anna's elder sister, would arrive by and by
with Flora Valcour. "Connie", she said, had been left behind in the
clutches of the dressmaker!
"Flora," she continued, crinkling her nose ever so kind-heartedly at
Greenleaf, "is Lieutenant Mandeville's cousin, you know. Didn't he tell
you something back yonder in Carrollton?"
Greenleaf smiled an admission and her happy eyes closed to mere chinks.
What had been told was that Constance had yesterday accepted Mandeville.
"Yes," jovially put in the lucky man, "I have divulge' him that, and he
seem' almoze as glad as the young lady herseff!"
Even to this the sweet widow's misplaced wrinkles faintly replied, while
Greenleaf asked, "Does the Lieutenant's good fortune account for
the--'clutches of the dressmaker'?"
It did. The Lieutenant hourly expecting to be ordered to the front, this
wedding, like so many others, would be at the earliest day possible. "A
great concession," the lady said, turning her piquant wrinkles this time
upon Mandeville. But just here the General engrossed attention. His
voice had warmed sentimentally and his kindled eye was passing back and
forth between Anna seated by him and Hilary close at hand in the saddle.
He waved wide:
"This all-pervading haze and perfume, dew and dream," he was saying, "is
what makes this the Lalla Rookh's land it is!" He smiled at himself and
confessed that Carrollton Gardens always went to his head. "Anna, did
you ever hear your mother sing--
"'There's a bower of roses--'?"
She lighted up to say yes, but the light was all he needed to be lured
on through a whole stanza, and a tender sight--Ocean silvering to
brown-haired Cynthia--were the two, as he so innocently strove to
recreate out of his own lost youth, for her and his nephew, this
atmosphere of poetry.
"'To sit in the roses and hear the bird's song!'"
he suavely ended--"I used to make Hilary sing that for me when he was a
boy."
"Doesn't he sing it yet?" asked Mrs. Callender.
"My God, madame, since I found him addicted to comic songs I've never
asked him!"
Kincaid led the laugh and the talk became lively. Anna was merrily
accused by Miranda (Mrs. Callender) of sharing the General's abhorrence
of facetious song. First she pleaded guilty and then reversed her plea
with an absurd tangle of laughing provisos delightful even to herself.
At the same time the General withdrew from his nephew all imputation of
a frivolous mind, though the nephew avowed himself nonsensical from
birth and destined to die so. It was a merry moment, so merry that
Kincaid's bare mention of Mandeville as Mandy made even the General
smile and every one else laugh. The Creole, to whom any mention of
himself, (whether it called for gratitude or for pistols and coffee,)
was always welcome, laughed longest. If he was Mandy, he hurried to
rejoin, the absent Constance "muz be Candy--ha, ha, ha!" And when Anna
said Miranda should always thenceforth be Randy, and Mrs. Callender said
Anna ought to be Andy, and the very General was seduced into suggesting
that then Hilary would be Handy, and when every one read in every one's
eye, the old man's included, that Brodnax would naturally be Brandy, the
Creole bent and wept with mirth, counting all that fine wit exclusively
his.
"But, no!" he suddenly said, "Hilary he would be Dandy, bic-ause he's
call' the ladies' man!"
"No, sir!" cried the General. "Hil--" He turned upon his nephew, but
finding him engaged with Anna, faced round to his chum: "For Heaven's
sake, Greenleaf, does he allow--?"
"He can't help it now," laughed his friend, "he's tagged it on himself
by one of his songs."
"Oh, by Jove, Hilary, it serves you right for singing them!"
Hilary laughed to the skies, the rest echoing.
"A ladies' man!" the uncle scoffed on. "Of all things on God's earth!"
But there he broke into lordly mirth: "Don't you believe _that_ of him,
ladies, at any rate. If only for my sake, Anna, don't you _ever_
believe a breath of it!"
The ladies laughed again, but now Kincaid found them a distraction.
Following his glance cityward they espied a broad dust-cloud floating
off toward the river. He turned to Anna and softly cried, "Here come
your guns, trying to beat the train!"
The ladies stood up to see. An unseen locomotive whistled for a brief
stop. The dust-cloud drew nearer. The engine whistled to start again,
and they could hear its bell and quickening puff. But the dust-cloud
came on and on, and all at once the whole six-gun battery--six horses
to each piece and six to each caisson--captain, buglers, guidon,
lieutenants, sergeants and drivers in the saddle, cannoneers on the
chests--swept at full trot, thumping, swaying, and rebounding, up the
highway and off it, and, forming sections, swung out upon the field in
double column, while the roaring train rolled by it and slowed up to the
little frame box of Buerthe's Station with passengers cheering from
every window.
The Callenders' carriage horses were greatly taxed in their nerves, yet
they kept their discretion. Kept it even when now the battery flashed
from column into line and bore down upon them, the train meanwhile
whooping on toward Carrollton. And what an elated flock of brightly
dressed citizens and citizenesses had alighted from the cars--many of
them on the moment's impulse--to see these dear lads, with their
romantically acquired battery, train for the holiday task of scaring the
dastard foe back to their frozen homes! How we loved the moment's
impulse those days!
What a gay show! And among the very prettiest and most fetchingly
arrayed newcomers you would quickly have noticed three with whom this
carriage group exchanged signals. Kincaid spurred off to meet them while
Greenleaf and Mandeville helped Anna and Miranda to the ground. "There's
Constance," said the General.
"Yes," Mrs. Callender replied, "and Flora and Charlie Valcour!" as if
that were the gleefulest good luck of all.
IV
MANOEUVRES
Captain Irby, strong, shapely, well clad, auburn-haired, left his halted
command and came into the carriage group, while from the train
approached his cousin and the lithe and picturesque Miss Valcour.
The tallish girl always looked her best beside some manly form of
unusual stature, and because that form now was Hilary's Irby was
aggrieved. All their days his cousin had been getting into his light,
and this realization still shaded his brow as Kincaid yielded Flora to
him and returned to Anna to talk of things too light for record.
Not so light were the thoughts Anna kept unuttered. Here again, she
reflected, was he who (according to Greenleaf) had declined to command
her guns in order to let Irby have them. Why? In kindness to his cousin,
or in mild dislike of a woman's battery? If intuition was worth while,
this man was soon to be a captain somewhere. Here was that rare find for
which even maidens' eyes were alert those days--a born leader. No
ladies' man this--"of all things on God's earth!" A men's man! And
yet--nay, _therefore_--a man for some unparagoned woman some day to
yield her heart and life to, and to have for her very own, herself his
consummate adornment. She cast a glance at Flora.
But her next was to him as they talked on. How nearly black was the
waving abundance of his hair. How placid his brow, above eyes whose long
lashes would have made them meltingly tender had they not been so large
with mirth: "A boy's eyes," thought she while he remembered what he had
just called hers. She noted his mouth, how gently firm: "A man's mouth!"
Charlie Valcour broke in between them: "Is there not going to be any
drill, after all?"
"Tell Captain Irby you can't wait any longer," replied Kincaid with a
mock frown and gave Anna yet gayer attention a minute more. Then he
walked beside his cousin toward the command, his horse close at his
back. The group, by pairs, chose view points. Only Miss Valcour stayed
in the carriage with the General, bent on effecting a change in his
mind. In Mobile Flora had been easily first in any social set to which
she condescended. In New Orleans, brought into the Callenders' circles by
her cousin Mandeville, she had found herself quietly ranked second to
Anna, and Anna now yet more pointedly outshining her through the brazen
splendor of this patriotic gift of guns. For this reason and others yet
to appear she had planned a strategy and begun a campaign, one of whose
earliest manoeuvres must be to get Irby, not Kincaid, made their uncle's
adjutant-general, and therefore to persuade the uncle that to give
Kincaid the battery would endear him to Anna and so crown with victory
the old man's perfectly obvious plan.
Greenleaf left his horse tied and walked apart with Anna. This, he
murmured, was the last time they would be together for years.
"Yes," she replied with a disheartening composure, although from under
the parasol with which he shaded her she met his eyes so kindly that his
heart beat quicker. But before he could speak on she looked away to his
fretting horse and then across to the battery, where a growing laugh was
running through the whole undisciplined command. "What is it about?" she
playfully inquired, but then saw. In response to the neigh of
Greenleaf's steed Hilary's had paused an instant and turned his head,
but now followed on again, while the laughter ended in the clapping of a
hundred hands; for Kincaid's horse had the bridle free on his neck and
was following his master as a dog follows. Irby scowled, the General set
his jaws, and Hilary took his horse's bridle and led him on.
"That's what _I_ want to do every time I look at him!" called Charlie to
his sister.
"Then look the other way!" carolled back the slender beauty. To whom
Anna smiled across in her belated way, and wondered if the impulse to
follow Hilary Kincaid ever came to women.
But now out yonder the two cousins were in the saddle, Irby's sabre was
out, and soon the manoeuvres were fully under way. Flora, at the
General's side, missed nothing of them, yet her nimble eye kept her well
aware that across here in this open seclusion the desperate Greenleaf's
words to Anna were rarely explanatory of the drill.
"And now," proclaimed Mandeville, "you'll see them form into line fazed
to the rear!" And Flora, seeing and applauding, saw also Anna turn to
her suitor a glance, half pity for him, half pleading for his pity.
"I say unless--" Greenleaf persisted--
"There is no 'unless.' There can't ever be any."
"But may I not at least say--?"
"I'd so much rather you would not," she begged.
"At present, you mean?"
"Or in the future," said Anna, and, having done perfectly thus far,
spoiled all by declaring she would "never marry!" Her gaze rested far
across the field on the quietly clad figure of Kincaid riding to and fro
and pointing hither and yon to his gold-laced cousin. Off here on the
left she heard Mandeville announcing:
"Now they'll form batt'rie to the front by throwing caisson' to the
rear--look--look!... Ah, ha! was not that a prettie?"
Pretty it was declared to be on all sides. Flora called it "a
beautiful." Part of her charm was a Creole accent much too dainty for
print. Anna and Greenleaf and the other couples regathered about the
carriage, and Miss Valcour from her high seat smiled her enthusiasm down
among them, exalting theirs. And now as a new movement of the battery
followed, and now another, her glow heightened, and she called musically
to Constance, Mrs. Callender and Anna, by turns, to behold and admire.
For one telling moment she was, and felt herself, the focus of her
group, the centre of its living picture. Out afield yet another
manoeuvre was on, and while Anna and her suitor stood close below her
helplessly becalmed each by each, Flora rose to her feet and caught a
great breath of delight. Her gaze was on the glittering mass of men,
horses, and brazen guns that came thundering across the plain in double
column--Irby at its head, Kincaid alone on the flank--and sweeping right
and left deployed into battery to the front with cannoneers springing to
their posts for action.
"Pretties' of all!" she cried, and stood, a gentle air stirring her
light draperies, until the boys at the empty guns were red-browed and
short of breath in their fierce pretence of loading and firing. Suddenly
the guns were limbered up and went bounding over the field, caissons in
front. And now pieces passed their caissons, and now they were in line,
then in double column, and presently were gleaming in battery again,
faced to the rear. And now at command the tired lads dropped to the
ground to rest, or sauntered from one lounging squad to another, to chat
and chaff and puff cigarettes. Kincaid and Irby lent their horses to
Mandeville and Charlie, who rode to the battery while the lenders joined
the ladies.
Once more Hilary yielded Flora and sought Anna; but with kinder thought
for Flora Anna pressed herself upon Irby, to the open chagrin of his
uncle. So Kincaid cheerfully paired with Flora. But thus both he and
Anna unwittingly put the finishing touch upon that change of heart in
the General which Flora, by every subtlety of indirection, this hour and
more in the carriage, had been bringing about.
A query: With Kincaid and Irby the chief figures in their social arena
and Hilary so palpably his cousin's better in looks, in bearing,
talents, and character, is it not strange that Flora, having conquest
for her ruling passion, should strive so to relate Anna to Hilary as to
give her, Anna, every advantage for the higher prize? Maybe it is, but
she liked strangeness--and a stiff game.
V
HILARY?--YES, UNCLE?
Second half as well as first, the drill was ended. The low acacias and
great live-oaks were casting their longest shadows. The great plain
rested from the trample and whirl of hoofs, guns, and simulated battle.
A whiff of dust showed where the battery ambled townward among roadside
gardens, the Callender carriage spinning by it to hurry its three ladies
and Mandeville far away to the city's lower end. At the column's head
rode Irby in good spirits, having got large solace of Flora's society
since we last saw her paired with Kincaid. Now beside the tiny railway
station Hilary was with her once more as she and Charlie awaited the
train from town. Out afield were left only General Brodnax and
Greenleaf, dismounted between the Northerner's horse and Hilary's. Now
Kincaid came across the turf.
"Greenleaf," said the old soldier, "why does Hilary forever walk as
though he were bringing the best joke of the season? Can't you make him
quit it?"
The nephew joined them: "Uncle, if you'd like to borrow my horse I can
go by train."
That _was_ a joke. "H-m-m! I see! No, Greenleaf's going by train. Would
you like to ride with me?"
"Well, eh--ha! Why, uncle, I--why, of course, if Fred really--" They
mounted and went.
"Hilary?"
"Yes, uncle?"
"How is it now? Like my girl any better?"
"Why--yes! Oh, she's fine! And yet I--"
"You must say? What must you say?"
"Nothing much; only that she's not the kind to seem like the owner of a
field battery. My goodness! uncle, if she had half Miss Flora's tang--"
"She hasn't the least need of it! She's the quiet kind, sir, that fools
who love 'tang' overlook!"
"Yes," laughed Hilary, "she's quiet; quiet as a fortification by
moonlight! Poor Fred! I wish--"
"Well, thank God you wish in vain! That's just been settled. I asked
him--oh, don't look surprised at _me_. Good Lord! hadn't I the right to
know?"
The two rode some way in silence. "I wish," mused the nephew aloud, "it
could be as he wants it."
The uncle's smile was satirical: "Did you ever, my boy, wish anything
could be as _I_ want it?"
"Now, uncle, there's a big difference--"
"DAMN THE DIFFERENCE! I'm going to try you. I'm going to make Adolphe my
adjutant-general. Then if you hanker for this battery as it hankers for
you--"
"Mary, Queen of Scots!" rejoiced Hilary. "That'll suit us both to the
bone! And if it suits you too--"
"Well it doesn't! You know I've never wanted Adolphe about me. But
you've got me all snarled up, the whole kit of you. What's more, I
don't want him for my heir nor any girl with 'tang' for mistress of my
lands and people. Hilary, I swear! if you've got the sand to want Anna
and she's got the grace to take you, then, adjutant-general or not, I'll
leave you my whole fortune! Well, what amuses you now?"
"Why, uncle, all the cotton in New Orleans couldn't tempt me to marry
the girl I wouldn't take dry so without a continental cent."
"But your own present poverty might hold you back even from the girl you
wanted, mightn't it?"
"No!" laughed the nephew, "nothing would!"
"Good God! Well, if you'll want Anna I'll make it easy for you to ask
for her. If not, I'll make it as hard as I can for you to get any one
else."
Still Hilary laughed: "H-oh, uncle, if I loved any girl, I'd rather have
her without your estate than with it." Suddenly he sobered and glowed:
"I wish you'd leave it to Adolphe! He's a heap-sight better business man
than I. Besides, being older, he feels he has the better right to it.
You know you always counted on leaving it to him."
The General looked black: "You actually decline the gift?"
"No. No, I don't. I want to please you. But of my own free choice I
wouldn't have it. I'm no abolitionist, but I don't want that kind of
property. I don't want the life that has to go with it. I know other
sorts that are so much better. I'm not thinking only of the moral
responsibility--"
"By--! sir, I am!"
"I know you are, and I honor you for it."
"Bah!... Hilary, I--I'm much obliged to you for your company, but--"
"You've had enough," laughed the good-natured young man. "Good-evening,
sir." He took a cross-street.
"Good-evening, my boy." The tone was so kind that Hilary cast a look
back. But the General's eyes were straight before him.
Greenleaf accompanied the Valcours to their door. Charlie, who disliked
him, and whose admiration for his own sister was privately cynical, had
left them to themselves in the train. There, wholly undetected by the
very man who had said some women were too feminine and she was one, she
had played her sex against his with an energy veiled only by its
intellectual nimbleness and its utterly dispassionate design. Charlie
detected achievement in her voice as she twittered good-by to the
departing soldier from their street door.
VI
MESSRS. SMELLEMOUT AND KETCHEM
Night came, all stars. The old St. Charles Theatre filled to overflowing
with the city's best, the hours melted away while Maggie Mitchell played
_Fanchon_, and now, in the bright gas-light of the narrow thoroughfare,
here were Adolphe and Hilary helping their three ladies into a carriage.
All about them the feasted audience was pouring forth into the mild
February night.
The smallest of the three women was aged. That the other two were young
and beautiful we know already. At eighteen the old lady, the
Bohemian-glass one, had been one of those royalist refugees of the
French Revolution whose butterfly endeavors to colonize in Alabama and
become bees make so pathetic a chapter in history. When one knew that,
he could hardly resent her being heavily enamelled. Irby pressed into
the coach after the three and shut the door, Kincaid uncovered, and the
carriage sped off.
Hilary turned, glanced easily over the heads of the throng, and espied
Greenleaf beckoning with a slender cane. Together they crossed the way
and entered the office of a public stable.
"Our nags again," said Kincaid to one of a seated group, and passed into
a room beyond. Thence he re-issued with his dress modified for the
saddle, and the two friends awaited their mounts under an arch. "Dost
perceive, Frederic," said the facetious Hilary, "yon modestly arrayed
pair of palpable gents hieing hitherward yet pretending not to descry
us? They be detectives. Oh--eh--gentlemen!"
The strangers halted inquiringly and then came forward. The hair of one
was black, of the other gray. Hilary brightened upon them: "I was just
telling my friend who you are. You know me, don't you?" A challenging
glint came into his eye.
But the gray man showed a twinkle to match it: "Why--by sight--yes--what
there is of you."
Hilary smiled again: "I saw you this morning in the office of the
Committee of Public Safety, where I was giving my word that this friend
of mine should leave the city within twenty-four hours." He introduced
him: "Lieutenant Greenleaf, gentleman, United States Army. Fred, these
are Messrs. Smellemout and Ketchem, a leading firm in the bottling
business."
Greenleaf and the firm expressed their pleasure. "We hang out at the
corner of Poet and Good-Children Streets," said the black-haired man,
but made his eyes big to imply that this was romance.
Greenleaf lifted his brows: "Streets named for yourselves, I judge."
"Aye. Poet for each, Good-Children for both."
Kincaid laughed out. "The Lieutenant and I," he said as he moved toward
their approaching horses, "live on Love street exactly half-way between
Piety and Desire." His eyes widened, too. Suddenly he stepped between
Greenleaf and the others: "See here, let's begin to tell the truth! You
know Kincaid's Foundry? It was my father's--"
"And his father's before him," said the gray man.
"And I've come home to go into this war," Hilary went on.
"And just at present," said Gray, "you're casting shot and shell and now
and then a cannon; good for you! You want to give us your guarantee--?"
"That my friend and I will be together every moment till he leaves
to-morrow morning on the Jackson Railroad, bound for the North without a
stop."
"To go into this war on the other side!"
"Why, of course!" said the smiling Kincaid. "Now, that's all, isn't it?
I fear we're keeping you."
"Oh, no." The gray man's crow's-feet deepened playfully. "If you think
you need us we'll stick by you all night."
"No," laughed Kincaid, "there's no call for you to be so sticky as all
that." The horsemen mounted.
"Better us than the Patriots' League," said the younger detective to
Hilary as Greenleaf moved off. "They've got your friend down in their
Send-'em-to-hell book and are after him now. That's how come we to be--"
"I perceive," replied Hilary, and smiled in meditation. "Why--thank you,
both!"
"Oh, you go right along, Mr. Kincaid. We'll be at the depot to-morrow
ourselves, and to-night we'll see that they don't touch neither one of
you."
Hilary's smile grew: "Why--thank you again! That will make it more
comfortable for them. Good-night."
The two friends rode to a corner, turned into Poydras Street, crossed
Magazine and Tchoupitoulas and presently, out from among the echoing
fronts of unlighted warehouses, issued upon the wide, white Levee.
VII
BY STARLIGHT
"Wait," murmured Greenleaf, as they halted to view the scene. From their
far right came the vast, brimming river, turbid, swift, silent, its
billows every now and then rising and looking back as if they fled from
implacable pursuers; sweeping by long, slumbering ranks of ships and
steamboats; swinging in majestic breadth around the bend a mile or more
below; and at the city's end, still beyond, gliding into mystic
oblivion. Overhead swarmed the stars and across the flood came faintly
the breath of orange-groves, sea-marshes and prairies.
Greenleaf faced across the wide bend at his left. In that quarter, quite
hidden in live-oaks and magnolias, as both well knew, were the low, red
towers of Jackson Barracks. But it was not for them the evicted young
soldier claimed this last gaze. It was for a large dwelling hard by
them, a fine old plantation house with wide verandas, though it also was
shut from view, in its ancient grove.
"Fred," said Hilary, "didn't she tell you why?"
"No," replied the lover when they had turned away and were moving up the
harbor front, "except that it isn't because I'm for the Union."
Hilary's eyes went wide: "That's wonderful, old man! But I don't believe
she likes a soldier of any sort. If I were a woman I'd be doggoned if
I'd ever marry a soldier!"
"Yet the man who gets her," said Greenleaf, "ought to be a soldier in
every drop of his blood. You don't know her yet; but you soon will, and
I'm glad."
"Now, why so? I can't ever please her enough to be pleased with her. I'm
too confounded frivolous! I love nonsense, doggon it, for its own sake!
I love to get out under a sky like this and just reel and whoop in the
pure joy of standing on a world that's whirling round!"
"But you do please her. She's told me so."
"Don't you believe her! I don't. I can't. I tell you, Fred, I could
never trust a girl that forever looks so trustworthy! S'pose I should
fall in love with her! Would you--begrudge her to me?"
"I bequeath her to you."
"Ah! you know I haven't the ghost of a chance! She's not for po' little
Hil'ry. I never did like small women, anyhow!"
"My boy! If ever you like this one she'll no more seem small than the
open sea."
"I suppose," mused Hilary, "that's what makes it all the harder to let
go. If a girl has a soul so petty that she can sit and hear you through
to the last word your heart can bleed, you can turn away from her with
some comfort of resentment, as if you still had a remnant of your own
stature."
"Precisely!" said the lover. "But when she's too large-hearted to let
you speak, and yet answers your unspoken word, once for all, with a
compassion so modest that it seems as if it were you having compassion
on her, she's harder to give up than--"
"Doggon her, Fred, I wouldn't give her up!"
"Ah, this war, Hilary! I may never see her again. There's just one man
in this world whom--"
"Oh, get out!"
"I mean what I say. To you I leave her."
"Ha, ha! No, you don't! It's only to her you leave me. Old boy, promise
me! If you ever come back and she's still in the ring, you'll go for her
again no matter who else is bidding, your humble servant not excepted."
"Why--yes--I--I promise that. Now, will you promise me?"
"What! let myself--?"
"Yes."
"Ho-o, not by a jug-full! If ever I feel her harpoon in me I'll fight
like a whale! But I promise you this, and warn you, too: That when it
comes to that, a whole platoon of Fred Greenleafs between her and me
won't make a pinch of difference."
To that Greenleaf agreed, and the subject was changed. With shipping
ever on their left and cotton-yards and warehouses for tobacco and for
salt on their right their horses' feet clinked leisurely over the cobble
pavements, between thousands of cotton-bales headed upon the unsheltered
wharves and only fewer thousands on the narrow sidewalks.
So passed the better part of an hour before they were made aware, by
unmistakable odors, that they were nearing the Stock-Landing. There,
while they were yet just a trifle too far away to catch its echoes, had
occurred an incident--a fracas, in fact--some of whose results belong
with this narrative to its end. While they amble toward the spot let us
reconnoitre it. Happily it has long been wiped out, this blot on the
city's scutcheon. Its half-dozen streets were unspeakable mud, its air
was stenches, its buildings were incredibly foul slaughter-houses and
shedded pens of swine, sheep, beeves, cows, calves, and mustang ponies.
The plank footways were enclosed by stout rails to guard against the
chargings of long-horned cattle chased through the thoroughfares by
lasso-whirling "bull-drivers" as wild as they. In the middle of the
river-front was a ferry, whence Louisiana Avenue, broad, treeless,
grassy, and thinly lined with slaughter-houses, led across the plain.
Down this untidy plaisance a grimy little street-car, every half-hour,
jogged out to the Carrollton railway and returned. This street and the
water-front were lighted--twilighted--with lard-oil lamps; the rest of
the place was dark. At each of the two corners facing the ferry was a
"coffee-house"--dram-shop, that is to say.
Messrs. Sam Gibbs and Maxime Lafontaine were president and
vice-president of that Patriots' League against whose machinations our
two young men had been warned by the detectives in St. Charles Street.
They had just now arrived at the Stock-Landing. Naturally, on so
important an occasion they were far from sober; yet on reaching the spot
they had lost no time in levying on a Gascon butcher for a bucket of tar
and a pillow of feathers, on an Italian luggerman for a hurried supper
of raw oysters, and on the keeper of one of the "coffee-houses" for
drinks for the four.