and of a battery then called Bartleson's as often as Kincaid's by a
public which had half forgotten the seemingly well-established fact of
Hilary's death. Therein was no new shock. The new shock had come when,
as the three waited for telegrams, they stood before a vast ironclad
still on the ways but offering splendid protection from Farragut's
wooden terrors if only it could be completed, yet on which work had
ceased for lack of funds though a greater part of the needed amount,
already put up, lay idle solely because it could not be dragged up to a
total that would justify its outlay.
"How much does it fall short?" asked Anna with a heart at full stop, and
the pounding shock came when the shortage proved less than the missing
proceeds of the bazaar. For there heaved up the problem, whether to pass
on in the blind hope of finding her heart's own, or to turn instead and
seek the two detectives and the salvation of a city. This was the
dilemma which in the last few days had torn half the life out of her
and, more gravely than she knew, was threatening the remnant.
Constance and Miranda yearned, yet did not dare, to urge the latter
choice. They talked it over covertly on the back seat of the carriage,
Anna sitting bravely in front with the young "web-foot," as their wheels
next day plodded dustily westward out of Clinton. Hilary would never be
found, of course; and _if_ found how would he explain why he, coming
through whatever vicissitudes, he the ever ready, resourceful and
daring, he the men's and ladies' man in one, whom to look upon drew into
his service whoever looked, had for twelve months failed to get so much
as one spoken or written word to Anna Callender; to their heart-broken
Nan, the daily sight of whose sufferings had sharpened their wits and
strung their hearts to blame whoever, on any theory, could be blamed.
Undoubtedly he might have some dazzling explanation ready, but that
explanation they two must first get of him before she should know that
her dead was risen.
Our travellers were minus their outriders now. At dawn the squad,
leaving tender apologies in the night's stopping-place, had left the
ladies also, not foreseeing that demoralized servants would keep them
there with torturing delays long into the forenoon. When at length the
three followed they found highways in ruin, hoof-deep in dust and no
longer safe from blue scouts, while their infantry boy proved as
innocent of road wisdom as they, and on lonely by-ways led them astray
for hours. We may picture their bodily and mental distress to hear, at a
plantation house whose hospitality they craved when the day was near its
end, that they were still but nine miles from Clinton with eleven yet
between them and Big Black Bridge.
Yet they could have wept for thanks as readily as for chagrin or
fatigue, so kindly were they taken in, so stirring was the next word of
news.
"Why, you po' city child'en!" laughed two sweet unprotected women. "Let
these girls bresh you off. You sho'ly got the hafe o' Hinds County on
you ... Pemberton's men? Law, no; they _wuz_ on Big Black but they right
out here, now, on Champion's Hill, in sight f'om our gin-house ... Brodnax'
bri'--now, how funny! We jess heard o' them about a' hour
ago, f'om a bran' new critter company name' Ferry's Scouts. Why, Ferry's
f'om yo' city! Wish you could 'a' seen him--oh, all of 'em, they was
that slick! But, oh, slick aw shabby, when our men ah fine they ah fine,
now, ain't they! There was a man ridin' with him--dressed diff'ent--he
_wuz_ the batteredest-lookin', gayest, grandest--he might 'a' been a
gen'al! when in fact he was only a majo', an' it was him we heard say
that Brodnax was some'uz on the south side o' the railroad and couldn't
come up befo' night ... What, us? no, we on the nawth side. You didn't
notice when you recrossed the track back yondeh? Well, you _must_ 'a'
been ti-ud!"
Anna dropped a fervid word to Miranda that set their hostesses agape.
"Now, good Lawd, child, ain't you in hahdship and dangeh enough? Not one
o' you ain't goin' one step fu'ther this day. Do you want to git shot?
Grant's men are a-marchin' into Bolton's Depot right now. Why, honey,
you might as well go huntin' a needle in a haystack as to go lookin' fo'
Brodnax's brigade to-night. Gen'al Pemberton himself--why, he'd jest
send you to his rear, and that's Vicksburg, where they a-bein' shelled
by the boats day and night, and the women and child'en a-livin' in
caves. You don't want to go there?"
"We don't know," drolly replied Anna.
"Well, you stay hyuh. That's what that majo' told us. Says 'e, 'Ladies,
we got to fight a battle here to-morrow, but yo'-all's quickest way out
of it'll be to stay right hyuh. There'll be no place like home
to-morrow, not even this place,' says 'e, with a sort o' twinkle that
made us laugh without seein' anything to laugh at!"
LVII
GATES OF HELL AND GLORY
The next sun rose fair over the green, rolling, open land, rich in
half-grown crops of cotton and corn between fence-rows of persimmon and
sassafras. Before it was high the eager Callenders were out on a main
road. Their Mobile boy had left them and given the reins to an old man,
a disabled and paroled soldier bound homeward into Vicksburg. Delays
plagued them on every turn. At a cross-road they were compelled to wait
for a large body of infantry, followed by its ordnance wagons, to sweep
across their path with the long, swift stride of men who had marched for
two years and which changed to a double-quick as they went over a
hill-top. Or next they had to draw wildly aside into the zigzags of a
worm-fence for a column of galloping cavalry and shroud their heads from
its stifling dust while their driver hung to his mules' heads by the
bits. More than once they caught from some gentle rise a backward
glimpse of long thin lines puffing and crackling at each other; oftener
and more and more they heard the far resound of artillery, the
shuffling, clattering flight of shell, and their final peal as they
reported back to the guns that had sent them; and once, when the ladies
asked if a certain human note, rarefied by distance, was not the
hurrahing of boys on a school-ground, the old man said no, it was "the
Yanks charging." But never, moving or standing from aides or couriers
spurring to front or flank, or from hobbling wounded men or unhurt
stragglers footing to the rear, could they gather a word as to Brodnax's
brigade or Kincaid's Battery.
"Kincaid's Battery hell! You get those ladies out o' this as fast as
them mules can skedaddle."
By and by ambulances and then open wagons began to jolt and tilt past
them full of ragged, grimy, bloody men wailing and groaning, no one
heeding the entreaties of the three ladies to be taken in as nurses.
Near a cross-road before them they saw on a fair farmhouse the yellow
flag, and a vehicle or two at its door, yet no load of wounded turned
that way. Out of it, instead, excited men were hurrying, some lamely,
feebly, afoot, others at better speed on rude litters, but all rearward
across the plowed land. Two women stepped out into a light trap and
vanished behind a lane hedge before Constance could call the attention
of her companions.
"Why, Nan, if we didn't _know_ she was in New Orleans I'd stand the
world down that that was Flora!"
There was no time for debate. All at once, in plain sight, right at
hand, along a mask of young willows in the near left angle of the two
roads, from a double line of gray infantry whose sudden apparition had
startled Anna and Miranda, rang a long volley. From a fringe of woods on
the far opposite border the foe's artillery pealed, and while the
Callenders' mules went into agonies of fright the Federal shells began
to stream and scream across the space and to burst before and over the
gray line lying flat in the furrows and darting back fire and death.
With their quaking equipage hugging the farther side of the way the
veiled ladies leaned out to see, but drew in as a six-mule wagon coming
from the front at wild speed jounced and tottered by them. It had nearly
passed when with just a touch of hubs it tossed them clear off the road,
smashing one of their wheels for good and all. Some one sprang and held
their terrified mules and they alighted on a roadside bank counting
themselves already captured.
"Look out, everybody," cried a voice, "here come our own guns, six of
'em, like hell to split!" and in a moment the way was cleared.
A minute before this, down the cross-road, southward a quarter of a mile
or so, barely out of sight behind fence-rows, the half of a battalion of
artillery had halted in column, awaiting orders. With two or three
lesser officers a general, galloping by it from behind, had drawn up on
a slight rise at the southwest corner of the fire-swept field, taken one
glance across it and said, "Hilary, can your ladies' men waltz into
action in the face of those guns?"
"They can dance the figure, General."
"Take them in."
Bartleson, watching, had mounted drivers and cannoneers before Kincaid
could spur near enough to call, "Column, forward!" and turn again
toward the General and the uproar beyond. The column had barely
stretched out when, looking back on it as he quickened pace, Hilary's
cry was, "Battery, trot, march!" So the six guns had come by the
general: first Hilary, sword out, pistols in belt; then his adjutant;
then bugler and guidon, and then Bartleson and the boys; horses striding
out--ah, there were the Callenders' own span!--whips cracking,
carriages thumping and rumbling, guns powder-blackened and brown, their
wheels, trails, and limbers chipped and bitten, and their own bronze
pock-pitted by the flying iron and lead of other fights, and the heroes
in saddle and on chests--with faces as war-worn as the wood and metal
and brute life under them--cheering as they passed. Six clouds of dust
in one was all the limping straggler had seen when he called his glad
warning, for a tall hedge lined half the cross-road up which the
whirlwind came; but a hundred yards or so short of the main way the
whole battery, still shunning the field because of spongy ground, swept
into full view at a furious gallop. Yet only as a single mass was it
observed, and despite all its thunder of wheels was seen only, not
heard. Around the Callenders was a blindfold of dust and vehicles, of
shouting and smoke, and out in the field the roar of musketry and
howling and bursting of shell. Even Flora, in her ambulance close beyond
both roads, watching for the return of a galloping messenger and seeing
Hilary swing round into the highway, low bent over his charger at full
run, knew him only as he vanished down it hidden by the tempest of
hoofs, wheels, and bronze that whirled after him.
At Anna's side among the rearing, trembling teams a mounted officer, a
surgeon, Flora's messenger, was commanding and imploring her to follow
Constance and Miranda into the wagon which had wrecked their conveyance.
And so, alas! all but trampling her down, yet unseeing and unseen though
with her in every leap of his heart, he who despite her own prayers was
more to her than a country's cause or a city's deliverance flashed by,
while in the dust and thunder of the human avalanche that followed she
stood asking whose battery was this and with drowned voice crying, as
she stared spell-bound, "Oh, God! is it only Bartleson's? Oh, God of
mercy! where is Hilary Kincaid?" A storm of shell burst directly
overhead. Men and beasts in the whirling battery, and men and beasts
close about her wailed, groaned, fell. Anna was tossed into the wagon,
the plunging guns, dragging their stricken horses, swept out across the
field, the riot of teams, many with traces cut, whipped madly away, and
still, thrown about furiously in the flying wagon, she gazed from her
knees and mutely prayed, but saw no Hilary because while she looked for
a rider his horse lay fallen.
Never again came there to that band of New Orleans boys such an hour of
glory as this at Champion's Hill. For two years more, by the waning
light of a doomed cause, they fought on, won fame and honor; but for
blazing splendor--of daring, skill, fortitude, loss and achievement
which this purblind world still sees plainest in fraternal
slaughter--that was the mightiest hour, the mightiest ten minutes, ever
spent, from 'Sixty-one to 'Sixty-five, by Kincaid's Battery.
Right into the face of death's hurricane sprang the ladies' man, swept
the ladies' men. "Battery, trot, walk. Forward into battery! Action
front!" It was at that word that Kincaid's horse went down; but while
the pieces trotted round and unlimbered and the Federal guns vomited
their fire point-blank and blue skirmishers crackled and the gray line
crackled back, and while lead and iron whined and whistled, and chips,
sand and splinters flew, and a dozen boys dropped, the steady voice of
Bartleson gave directions to each piece by number, for "solid shot," or
"case" or "double canister." Only one great blast the foe's artillery
got in while their opponents loaded, and then, with roar and smoke as if
the earth had burst, Kincaid's Battery answered like the sweep of a
scythe. Ah, what a harvest! Instantly the guns were wrapped in their own
white cloud, but, as at Shiloh, they were pointed again, again and again
by the ruts of their recoil, Kincaid and Bartleson each pointing one as
its nine men dwindled to five and to four, and in ten minutes nothing
more was to be done but let the gray line through with fixed bayonets
while Charlie, using one of Hilary's worn-out quips, stood on Roaring
Betsy's trunnion-plates and cursed out to the shattered foe, "Bricks,
lime and sand always on hand!--,--,--!"
Yet this was but a small part of the day's fight, and Champion's Hill
was a lost battle. Next day the carnage was on Baker's Creek and at Big
Black Bridge, and on the next Vicksburg was invested.
LVIII
ARACHNE
Behold, "Vicksburg and the Bends."
In one of those damp June-hot caves galleried into the sheer yellow-clay
sides of her deep-sunken streets, desolate streets where Porter's great
soaring, howling, burrowing "lamp-posts" blew up like steamboats and
flew forty ways in search of women and children, dwelt the Callenders.
Out among Pemberton's trenches and redans, where the woods were dense on
the crowns and faces of the landside bluffs, and the undergrowth was
thick in the dark ravines, the minie-ball forever buzzed and pattered,
and every now and then dabbed mortally into some head or breast. There
ever closer and closer the blue boys dug and crept while they and the
gray tossed back and forth the hellish hand-grenade, the heavenly
hard-tack and tobacco, gay jokes and lighted bombs. There, mining and
countermining, they blew one another to atoms, or under shrieking shells
that tore limbs from the trees and made missiles of them hurled
themselves to the assault and were hurled back. There, in a ruined villa
whose shrubberies Kincaid named "Carrollton Gardens," quartered old
Brodnax, dining on the fare we promised him from the first, and there
the nephew sang an ancient song from which, to please his listeners, he
had dropped "old Ireland" and made it run:
"O, my heart's in New Orleans wherever I go--"
meaning, for himself, that wherever roamed a certain maiden whose
whereabouts in Dixie he could only conjecture, there was the New Orleans
of his heart.
One day in the last week of the siege a young mother in the Callenders'
cave darted out into the sunshine to rescue her straying babe and was
killed by a lump of iron. Bombardments rarely pause for slips like that,
yet the Callenders ventured to her burial in a graveyard not far from
"Carrollton Gardens." As sympathy yet takes chances with contagions it
took them then with shells.
Flora Valcour daily took both risks--with contagions in a field hospital
hard by the cemetery, and with shells and stray balls when she fled at
moments from the stinking wards to find good air and to commune with her
heart's desires and designs. There was one hazard beside which foul air
and stray shots were negligible, a siege within this siege. To be
insured against the mere mathematical risk that those designs, thus far
so fortunate, might by any least mishap, in the snap of a finger, come
to naught she would have taken chances with the hugest shell Grant or
Porter could send. For six weeks Anna and Hilary--Anna not knowing if he
was alive, he thinking her fifty leagues away--had been right here,
hardly an hour's walk asunder. With what tempest of heart did the
severed pair rise at each dawn, lie down each night; but Flora suffered
no less. Let either of the two get but one glimpse, hear but one word,
of the other, and--better a shell, slay whom it might.
On her granddaughter's brow Madame Valcour saw the murk of the storm.
"The lightning must strike some time, you are thinking, eh?" she
simpered.
"No, not necessarily--thanks to your aid!"
Thanks far more to Flora's subtlety and diligence. It refreshed Madame
to see how well the fair strategist kept her purposes hid. Not even Irby
called them--those he discerned--hers. In any case, at any time, any
possessive but my or mine, or my or mine on any lip but his, angered
him. Wise Flora, whenever she alluded to their holding of the plighted
ones apart, named the scheme his till that cloyed, and then "ours" in a
way that made it more richly his, even when--clearly to Madame, dimly
to him, exasperatingly to both--her wiles for its success--woven around
his cousin--became purely feminine blandishments for purely feminine
ends. In her own mind she accorded Irby only the same partnership of
aims which she contemptuously shared with the grandam, who, like Irby,
still harped on assets, on that estate over in Louisiana which every one
else, save his uncle, had all but forgotten. The plantation and its
slaves were still Irby's objective, and though Flora was no less so, any
chance that for jealousy of her and Hilary he might throw Anna into
Hilary's arms, was offset by his evident conviction that the estate
would in that moment be lost to him and that no estate meant no Flora.
Madame kept that before him and he thanked and loathed her accordingly.
Flora's subtlety and diligence, yes, indeed. By skill in phrases and
silences, by truth misshapen, by flatteries daintily fitted, artfully
distributed, never overdone; by a certain slow, basal co-operation from
Irby (his getting Mandeville sent out by Pemberton with secret
despatches to Johnston, for example), by a deft touch now and then from
Madame, by this fine pertinacity of luck, and by a sweet new charity of
speech and her kindness of ministration on every side, the pretty
schemer had everybody blundering into her hand, even to the extent of
keeping the three Callenders convinced that Kincaid's Battery had been
cut off at Big Black Bridge and had gone, after all, to Mobile. No
wonder she inwardly trembled.
And there was yet another reason: since coming into Vicksburg, all
unaware yet why Anna so inordinately prized the old dagger, she had told
her where it still lay hid in Callender House. To a battery lad who had
been there on the night of the weapon's disappearance and who had died
in her arms at Champion's Hill, she had imputed a confession that,
having found the moving panel, a soldier boy's pure wantonness had
prompted him to the act which, in fact, only she had committed. So she
had set Anna's whole soul upon getting back to New Orleans to regain the
trinket-treasure and somehow get out with it to Mobile, imperiled
Mobile, where now, if on earth anywhere, her hope was to find Hilary
Kincaid.
Does it not tax all patience, that no better intuition of heart, no
frenzy of true love in either Hilary or Anna--suffering the frenzies
they did--should have taught them to rend the poor web that held them
separate almost within the sound of each other's cry? No, not when we
consider other sounds, surrounding conditions: miles and miles of
riflemen and gunners in so constant a whirlwind of destruction and
anguish that men like Maxime Lafontaine and Sam Gibbs went into open
hysterics at their guns, and even while sleeping on their arms, under
humming bullets and crashing shells and over mines ready to be sprung,
sobbed and shivered like babes, aware in their slumbers that they might
"die before they waked." In the town unearthly bowlings and volcanic
thunders, close overhead, cried havoc in every street, at every cave
door. There Anna, in low daily fevers, with her "heart in New Orleans,"
had to be "kept quiet" by Miranda and Constance, the latter as widowed
as Anna, wondering whether "Steve was alive or not."
This is a history of hearts. Yet, time flying as it does, the wild
fightings even in those hearts, the famishing, down-breaking sieges in
them, must largely be left untold--Hilary's, Anna's, Flora's, all.
Kincaid was in greater temptation than he knew. Many a battery boy,
sick, sound or wounded--Charlie for one--saw it more plainly than he.
Anna, supposed to be far away and away by choice, was still under the
whole command's impeachment, while Flora, amid conditions that gave
every week the passional value of a peacetime year, was here at hand, an
ever-ministering angel to them and to their hero; yet they never
included him and Flora in one thought together but to banish it, though
with tender reverence. Behind a labored disguise of inattention they
jealously watched lest the faintest blight or languor should mar, in
him, the perfect bloom of that invincible faith to, and faith in, the
faithless Anna, which alone could satisfy their worship of him. Care for
these watchers brought the two much together, and in every private
moment they talked of the third one; Flora still fine in the role of
Anna's devotee and Hilary's "pilot," rich in long-thought-out
fabrications, but giving forth only what was wrung from her and parting
with each word as if it cost her a pang. Starving and sickening,
fighting and falling, the haggard boys watched; yet so faultless was the
maiden's art that when in a fury of affright at the risks of time she
one day forced their commander to see her heart's starvation for him the
battery saw nothing, and even to him she yet appeared faultless in
modesty and utterly, marvelously, splendidly ignorant of what she had
done.
"Guide right!" he mused alone. "At last, H.K., your nickname's got a
meaning worth living up to!"
While he mused, Flora, enraged both for him and against him, and with
the rage burning in her eye and on her brow, stood before her seated
grandmother, mutely giving gaze for gaze until the elder knew.
The old woman resumed her needle. "And all you have for it," was the
first word, "is his pity, eh?"
"Wait!" murmured the girl. "I will win yet, if I have to lose--"
"Yes?" skeptically simpered the grandam, "--have to lose yourself to do
it?"
The two gazed again until the maiden quietly nodded and her senior
sprang half up:
"No, no! ah, no-no-no! There's a crime awaiting you, but not that! Oh,
no, you are no such fool!"
"No?" The girl came near, bent low and with dancing eyes said, "I'll be
fool enough to lead him on till his sense of honor--"
"Sense of--oh, ho, ho!"
"Sense of his honor and _mine_--will make him my prisoner. Or else--!"
The speaker's eyes burned. Her bosom rose and fell.
"Yes," said the seated one--to her needle--"or else his sense that
Charlie--My God! don't pinch my ear off!"
"Happy thought," laughed Flora, letting go, "but a very poor guess."
LIX
IN A LABYRINTH
For ladies' funerals, we say, mortars and siege-guns, as a rule, do not
pause. But here at Vicksburg there was an hour near the end of each day
when the foe, for some mercy to themselves, ceased to bombard, and in
one of these respites that procession ventured forth in which rode the
fevered Anna: a farm wagon, a battered family coach, a carryall or two.