two women had spent much time of late on a small boat which daily made
the round of the bay's defenses. In a dingy borrowed rig they hastened
away toward their lodgings.
As they drove, Anna pressed Miranda's hand and murmured, "Oh, for Hilary
Kincaid!"
"Ah, dear! not to be in this--'tea-party'?"
"Yes! Yes! His boys were in so many without him, from Shiloh to Port
Gibson, and now, with all their first guns lost forever--theirs and
ours--lost _for_ them, not by them--and after all this year of
idleness, and the whole battery hanging to his name as it does--oh,
'Randy, it would do more to cure his hurts than ten hospitals, there or
here."
"But the new risks, Nan, as he takes them!"
"He'll take them wherever he is. I can't rest a moment for fear he's
trying once more to escape."
(In fact, that is what, unknown to her, he had just been doing.)
"But, 'Randa?"
"Yes, dear?"
"Whether he's here or there, Kincaid's Battery, his other self, will be
in whatever goes on, and so, of course, will the _Tennessee_."
"Yes," said Miranda, at their door.
"Yes, and it's not just all our bazaar money that's in her, nor all our
toil--"
"Nor all your sufferings," interrupted Miranda, as Constance wonderingly
let them in.
"Oh, nor yours! nor Connie's! nor all--his; nor our whole past of the
last two interminable years; but this whole poor terrified city's fate,
and, for all we know, the war's final issue! And so I--Here, Con,"
(handing a newspaper), "from Steve, husband."
(Behind the speaker Miranda, to Constance, made eager hand and lip
motions not to open it there.)
"And so, 'Ran, I wish we could go ashore to-morrow, as far down the bay
as we can make our usefulness an excuse, and stay!--day and
night!--till--!" She waved both hands.
Constance stared: "Why, Nan Callender!"
"Now, Con, hush. You and Steve Second are non-combatants! Oh, 'Randa,
let's do it! For if those ships--some of them the same we knew so well
and so terribly at home--if they come I--whatever happens--I want to see
it!"
LXVIII
BY THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT
Luck loves to go in mask. It turned out quite as well, after all, that
for two days, by kind conspiracy of Constance and Miranda, the boat trip
was delayed. In that time no fleet came.
Here at the head of her lovely bay tremblingly waited Mobile, never
before so empty of men, so full of women and children. Southward, from
two to four leagues apart, ran the sun-beaten, breezy margins of
snow-white sand-hills evergreen with weird starveling pines, dotted with
pretty summer homes and light steamer-piers. Here on the Eastern Shore
were the hotels: "Howard's," "Short's," "Montrose," "Battle's Wharf" and
Point Clear, where summer society had been wont to resort all the way
from beloved New Orleans. Here, from Point Clear, the bay, broadening
south-westward, doubled its width, and here, by and by, this eastern
shore-line suddenly became its southern by returning straight westward
in a long slim stretch of dazzling green-and-white dunes, and shut its
waters from the Gulf of Mexico except for a short "pass" of a few
hundred yards width and for some three miles of shoal water between the
pass and Dauphin Island; and there on that wild sea-wall's end--Mobile
Point--a dozen leagues due south from the town--sat Fort Morgan, keeping
this gate, the port's main ship-channel. Here, north-west from Morgan,
beyond this main entrance and the league of impassable shoals, Fort
Gaines guarded Pelican Channel, while a mile further townward Fort
Powell held Grant's Pass into and out of Mississippi Sound, and here
along the west side, out from Mobile, down the magnolia-shaded Bay Shell
Road and the bark road below it, Kincaid's Battery and the last thousand
"reserves" the town's fighting blood could drip--whole platoons of them
mere boys--had marched, these two days, to Forts Powell and Gaines.
All this the Callenders took in with the mind's eye as they bent over a
candle-lighted map, while aware by telegraph that behind Gaines,
westward on Dauphin Island, blue troops from New Orleans had landed and
were then night-marching upon the fort in a black rainstorm. Furthest
down yonder, under Morgan's hundred and fifteen great guns, as Anna
pointed out, in a hidden east-and-west double row athwart the main
channel, leaving room only for blockade-runners, were the torpedoes,
nearly seventy of them. And, lastly, just under Morgan's north side,
close on the channel's eastern edge, rode, with her three small
gunboats, the _Tennessee_, ugly to look at but worse to meet,
waiting, watching, as up here in Fort Powell, smiling at the scurviness
of their assignment, watched and waited Kincaid's Battery.
Upstairs the new Steve gently wailed.
"Let me!" cried Anna, and ran.
Constance drew out Mandeville's newspaper. Miranda smiled despairingly.
"I wish, now," sighed the sister, "we'd shown it when we got it. I've
had enough of keeping things from Nan Callender. Of course, even among
our heroes in prison, there still may be a 'Harry Rénard'; but it's far
more likely that someone's telegraphed or printed 'Hilary Kinkaid' that
way; for there _was_ a Herry Rénard, Steve says, a captain, in Harper's
calvary, who months ago quietly died in one of our _own
hospitals_--at Lauderdale. Now, at headquarters, Steve says, they're
all agreed that the name isn't a mite more suggestive than the pure
daring of the deed, and that if they had to guess who did it they'd
every one guess Hilary Kincaid."
She spread the story out on her knee: Exchange of prisoners having
virtually ceased, a number of captive Confederate officers had been
started up the Mississippi from New Orleans, _under_ a heavy _but
unwary_ guard, on a "tin-clad" steamer, to wear out the rest of the war
in a Northern prison. Forbidden to gather even in pairs, they had yet
moved freely about, often passing each other closely enough to exchange
piecemeal counsels unnoticed, and all at once, at a tap of the boat's
bell had sprung, man for man, upon their keepers and instantly were
masters of them, of them, of their arms stacked on the boiler-deck and
of the steamboat, which they had promptly run ashore on the East
Louisiana side and burned. So ran the tale, and so broke off. Ought Anna
to be told it, or not?
"No," said the sister. "After all, why should we put her again through
all those sufferings that so nearly killed her after Shiloh?"
"If he would only--"
"Telegraph? How do we know he hasn't?"
Next morning the two unencumbered Callenders went down the bay. But they
found no need to leave the boat. A series of mishaps delayed her, the
tide hindered, rain fell, and at length she was told to wait for orders
and so lay all night at anchor just off Fort Gaines, but out of the
prospective line of fire from the foe newly entrenched behind it. The
rain ceased and, as one of Hilary's songs ran--
"The stars shed forth their light serene."
The ladies had the captain's room, under the pilot-house. Once Anna
woke, and from the small windows that opened to every quarter except up
the bay townward looked forth across the still waters and low shores.
Right at hand loomed Fort Gaines. A league away north-west rose small
Fort Powell, just enough from the water to show dimly its unfinished
parapets. In her heart's vision she saw within it her own Kincaid's
Battery, his and hers. South-eastward, an opposite league away, she
could make out Fort Morgan, but not the Tennessee. The cool, briny air
hung still, the wide waters barely lifted and fell. She returned and
slept again until some one ran along the narrow deck under her reclosed
windows, and a male voice said--
"The Yankee fleet! It's coming in!"
Miranda was dressing. Out on the small deck voices were quietly audible
and the clink of a ratchet told that the boat was weighing anchor. She
rang three-bells. The captain's small clock showed half-past five. Now
the swiftly dressed pair opened their windows. The rising sun made a
golden path across the tranquil bay and lighted up the three forts and
the starry battlecross softly stirring over each. Dauphin Island and
Mobile Point were moss-green and pearly white. The long, low, velvety
pulsations of the bay were blue, lilac, pink, green, bronze. But angry
smoke poured from the funnels of the Tennessee and her three dwarf
consorts, they four also showing the battle-flag, and some seven miles
away, out in the Gulf, just beyond the gleaming eastern point of Sand
Island, was one other sign of unrest.
"You see they're under way?" asked Anna.
Yes, Miranda saw, and sighed with the questioner. For there, once
more--low crouched, war-painted and gliding like the red savages so many
of them were named for, the tall ones stripped of all their upper spars,
but with the pink spot of wrath flickering at every masthead--came the
ships of Farragut.
The two women could not count them, so straight on were they headed, but
a man near the window said there were seven large and seven less, lashed
small to large in pairs. Yet other counting they did, for now out of
Sand Island Channel, just west of the ships, came a shorter line--one,
two, three, four strange barely discernible things, submerged like
crocodiles, a hump on each of the first two, two humps on each of the
others, crossed the fleet's course and led the van on the sunward side
to bring themselves first and nearest to Morgan, its water-battery, and
the _Tennessee_.
Anna sighed while to Miranda the man overflowed with information. Ah,
ah! in Hampton Roads the _Virginia_ had barely coped with one of those
horrors, of one hump, two guns; while here came four, whose humps were
six and their giant rifles twelve.
"Twenty-two guns in our whole flotilla," the man was saying to Miranda,
"and they've got nearly two hundred." The anchor was up. Gently the
boat's engines held her against the flood-tide. The man had turned to
add some word, when from the land side of Gaines a single columbiad
roared and a huge shell screamed off into the investing entrenchments.
Then some lighter guns, thirty-twos, twenty-fours, cracked and rang, and
the foe replied. His shells burst over and in the fort, and a cloud of
white and brown smoke rolled eastward, veiling both this scene and the
remoter, seaward, silent, but far more momentous one of Fort Morgan, the
fleet, and the _Tennessee_.
The boat crept southward into the cloud, where only Gaines was dimly
visible, flashing and howling landward. Irby was in that flashing. Steve
was back yonder in Powell with Kincaid's Battery. Through Steve, present
at the reading of a will made at Vicksburg the day after Hilary's
capture there, Irby had just notified Anna, for Hilary, that their uncle
had left everything to him, Adolphe. She hoped it was true, but for once
in her life had doubts without discomfort. How idly the mind can drift
in fateful moments. The bell tapped for six. As it did so the two
watchers descried through a rift in the smoke the Tennessee signaling
her grim litter, and the four crawling forward to meet the ships. Again
the smoke closed in, but the small boat stole through it and hovered at
its edge while the minutes passed and the foe came on. How plain to be
seen was each pair, how familiar some of those taller shapes!
"The _Brooklyn_, 'Randa, right in front. And there again is the
admiral's flag, on the _Hartford_. And there, with her topmasts down, is
the _Richmond_--oh, 'Ran', it's the same bad dream once more!"
Not quite. There were ships new to them, great and less, whose savage
names, told by the man near the window, chilled the blood with reminder
of old wars and massacres: the _Winnebago, Chickasaw, Octorora, Ossipee,
Metacomet, Séminale_. "Look!" said the man, pointing, "the _Tecumseh_--"
LXIX
SOUTHERN CROSS AND NORTHERN STAR
A red streak and white sun-lit puff sprang from the leading monitor's
turret, and the jarring boom of a vast gun came over the water, wholly
unlike the ringing peals of Gaines's lighter armament. Now its opposite
cranny puffed and thundered. The man smiled an instant. "Spitting on her
hands," he said, but then murmured to himself, "Lord! look at that
wind!"
"Is it bad?" asked Anna.
"It'll blow every bit of smoke into our men's eyes," he sighed.
The two white puffs melted into the perfect blue of sea and sky
unanswered. Fort Gaines and its besiegers even ceased to fire. Their
fate was not in their own guns. More and more weird waxed the grisly
dumbness of five-sided Morgan and the spectral silence of the oncoming
league-long fleet. The light wind freshened. By the bell's six taps it
was seven o'clock. The boat drifting in on the tide made Fort Gaines
seem to move seaward. Miranda looked back to Fort Powell and then out to
sea again.
"The worst," said Anna, reading her thought, "will be down there with
the _Tennessee_."
Miranda answered low: "Suppose, Nan, that, after all, he should--?"
Anna turned sharply: "Get here? I expect it! Oh, you may gaze! I don't
forget how often I've flouted Con's intuitions. But I've got one now, a
big one!"
"That he's coming?"
"Been coming these two days--pure presentiment!"
"Nan, whether he is or not, if you'll tell us what Colonel Greenleaf
wrote you I'll tell you--"
For a second Anna stared, Miranda wrinkling; but then, with her eyes on
the fleet, she shook her head: "You're mighty good, 'Randa, you and Con,
never to have asked me in all these months; but neither he nor Hilary
nor I will ever tell that. I wish none of us knew it. For one thing, we
don't, any of us, know clearly enough what really happened. Dear Fred
Greenleaf!--if he _does_ wear the blue, and _is_ right now over there
behind Fort Gaines!"
She stood a moment pondering a fact not in the Union soldier's letter at
all; that only through his masterful, self-sacrificing intercession in
military court had Hilary escaped the death of a spy. But then her
thought came back to Miranda's request: "I can't tell you, for I can't
tell Con. Flora's her cousin, through Steve, and if she ever marries
Captain Irby she'll be Hilary's cousin, and--"
There, suddenly and once for all, the theme was dropped. Some man's
quick word broke in. Fort Morgan had veiled itself in the smoke of its
own broadside. Now came its thunder and the answering flame and roar of
the _Brooklyn's_ bow-chaser. The battle had begun. The ship, still half
a mile from its mark, was coming on as straight as her gun could blaze,
her redskin ally at her side, and all the others, large and less,
bounding after by twos. And now in lurid flash and steady roar the
lightning and thunder darted and rolled from Morgan, its water-battery,
and the Mobile squadron, and from the bow guns of the _Brooklyn_ and
_Hartford_.
How marvelously fire, din and smoke shriveled up the time, which the
captain's small clock so mincingly ticked off. A cabin-boy brought a
fragrant tray of breakfast, but the grateful ladies could only laugh at
it. There was no moment to observe even the few pretty sail-boats which
the fearful import and majesty of the strife lured down about them on
the light side-wind.
"Has the _Tennessee_ not fired yet?" anxiously asked Anna, but no one
was sure. Across the breeze, that kept the near side of the picture
uncurtained, she perfectly saw the _Tecumseh_ close abreast of the
flashing, smoke-shrouded fort, the _Brooklyn_ to windward abreast of
both, and the Hartford at the Brooklyn's heels with her signal
fluttering to all behind, "Close order."
"Why don't the ships--?" Anna had it on her lips to cry, when the whole
sunward side of the _Brooklyn,_ and then of the _Hartford,_ vomited
fire, iron and blinding, strangling smoke into the water-battery and the
fort, where the light air held it. God's mercy! you could see the
cheering of the fleet's crews, which the ear could barely gather out of
the far uproar, and just as it floated to the gazers they beheld the
_Tecumseh_ turn square toward them and head straight across the double
line of torpedoes for the _Tennessee._
We never catch all of "whatever happens," and neither Callender saw the
brave men in gray who for one moment of horror fled from their own guns
in water-battery and fort; but all at once they beheld the _Tecumseh_
heave, stagger, and lurch like a drunkard, men spring from her turret
into the sea, the _Brooklyn_ falter, slacken fire and draw back, the
Hartford and the whole huddled fleet come to a stand, and the rallied
fort cheer and belch havoc into the ships while the _Tecumseh_ sunk her
head, lifted her screw into air and vanished beneath the wave. They saw
Mobile Point a semicircle of darting fire, and the _Brooklyn_ "athwart
the _Hartford's_ hawse"; but they did not see, atom-small, perched high
in the rigging of the flag-ship and demanding from the decks below, "why
this?" and "why that?" a certain "plain sailor" well known to New
Orleans and the wide world; did not see the torpedoes lying in watery
ambush for him, nor hear the dread tale of them called to him from the
_Brooklyn_ while his ship passed astern of her, nor him command "full
speed ahead" as he retorted, "Damn the torpedoes!"
They saw his ship and her small consort sweep undestroyed over the
dead-line, the _Brooklyn_ follow with hers, the Mobile gunboats rake
the four with a fire they could not return, and behind them Fort Morgan
and the other ships rend and shatter each other, shroud the air with
smoke and thresh the waters white with shot and shell, shrapnel,
canister and grape. And then they saw their own _Tennessee_ ignore the
monitors and charge the _Hartford_. But they beheld, too, the
_Hartford's_ better speed avoid the fearful blow and press on up the
channel and the bay, though torn and bleeding from her foe's broadside,
while her own futilely glanced or rebounded from his impenetrable mail.
Wisely, rightly their boat turned and slowly drew away toward Fort
Powell and Cedar Point. Yet as from her after deck they saw the same
exploit, at the same murderous cost, repeated by the _Brooklyn_ and
another and another great ship and their consorts, while not a torpedo
did its work, they tearfully called the hour "glorious" and "victorious"
for the _Tennessee_ and her weak squadron, that still fought on. So it
seemed to them even when more dimly, as distance and confusion grew and
rain-clouds gathered, they saw a wooden ship ram the _Tennessee_, but
glance off, and the slow _Tennessee_ drop astern, allow a sixth tall
ship and small consort to pass, but turn in the wake of the seventh and
all but disembowel her with the fire of her great bow gun.
Ah, Anna! Even so, the shattered, steam-scalded thing came on and the
last of the fleet was in. Yonder, a mere league eastward, it moved up
the bay. Yet proudly hope throbbed on while still Mobile, behind other
defenses, lay thirty miles away, while her gunboats still raked the
ships, while on Powell, Gaines and Morgan still floated the Southern
cross, and while, down in the pass, still unharmed, paused only for
breath the _Tennessee_.
"Prisoners! they are all our prisoners!" tearfully exulted the fond
Callenders. But on the word they saw the scene dissolve into a new one.
Through a squall of wind and rain, out from the line of ships, four of
their consorts glided away eastward, flashing and howling, in chase of
the overmatched gunboats, that flashed and howled in retort as they
fled. On the west a Federal flotilla in Mississippi Sound, steaming up
athwart Grant's Pass, opened on Fort Powell and awoke its thunders. Ah,
ah! Kincaid's Battery at last! Red, white and red they sent buffet for
buffet, and Anna's heart was longing anew for their tall hero and hers,
when a voice hard by said, "She's coming back, sir, the _Tennessee_."
Out in the bay the fleet, about to anchor, turned and awaited the new
onset. By the time it was at hand the Mobile gunboats, one burning, one
fled, one captured, counted for nothing, yet on crept the _Tennessee_,
still singling out the _Hartford_, and here the two Callenders, their
boat hovering as near Powell and Gaines as it dared, looked on the
titanic mêlée that fell round her. Like hounds and hunters on a bear
robbed of her whelps, seventeen to one, they set upon her so thickly
that their trouble was not to destroy one another. Near the beginning
one cut her own flag-ship almost to the water-line. The first that smote
the quarry--at ten knots speed--glanced and her broadside rolled
harmless into the bay, while two guns of her monster adversary let
daylight through and through the wooden ship. From the turret of a
close-creeping monitor came the four-hundred-and-forty-pound bolt of
her fifteen-inch gun, crushing the lone foe terribly yet not quite
piercing through. Another wooden ship charged, hit squarely a tearing
blow, yet slid off, lay for a moment touching sides with the ironclad,
while they lacerated each other like lion and tiger, and then dropped
away. The hunted _Hartford_ gave a staggering thrust and futile
broadside.
So for an hour went the fight; ships charging, the _Tennessee_ crawling
ever after her one picked antagonist, the monitors' awful guns forever
pounding her iron back and sides. But at length her mail began to yield,
her best guns went silent, her smokestack was down, her steering-chains
were gone, Buchanan lay heavily wounded. Of Farragut's twenty-seven
hundred men more than a seventh had fallen, victims mainly of the bear
and her cubs, yet there she weltered, helpless. From her grim disjointed
casemate her valorous captain let down the Southern cross, the white
flag rose, and instantly, everywhere, God's thunder and man's alike
ceased, and the merciful heavens smiled white and blue again. But their
smile was on the flag of the Union, and mutely standing in each other's
embrace, with hearts as nearly right as they could know, Anna and
Miranda gazed on the victorious stars-and-stripes and wept.
What caused Anna to start and glance behind she did not know; but doing
so she stared an instant breathless and then, as she clutched Miranda
for support, moaned to the tall, wasted, sadly smiling, crutched figure
that moved closer--
"Oh, Hilary! Are you Hilary Kincaid?"
LXX
GAINS AND LOSSES
They kissed.
It looks strange written and printed, but she did not see how to hold
off when he made it so tenderly manful a matter of course after his
frank hand-shake with Miranda, and when there seemed so little time for
words.
An ambulance drawn by the Callenders' horses had brought him and two or
three others down the West Side. A sail-boat had conveyed them from the
nearest beach. Here it was, now, in tow beside the steamboat as she
gathered headway toward Fort Powell. He was not so weak or broken but he
could point rapidly about with his crutches, the old light of command in
his eyes, while with recognized authority he spoke to the boat's master
and these companions.
He said things freely. There was not much down here to be secret about.
Mobile had not fallen. She would yet be fought for on land, furiously.
But the day was lost; as, incidentally, might be, at any moment, if not
shrewdly handled, this lonesome little boat.
Her captain moved to the pilot-house. Miranda and the junior officers
left Hilary with Anna. "Did you say 'the day,'" she softly asked, "or
'the bay'?"
"Both," he murmured, and with his two crutches in one hand directed her
eyes: to the fleet anchored midway off Morgan, Gaines, and Powell; to
the half-dozen gunboats on Mississippi Sound; to others still out in the
Gulf, behind Morgan, off Mobile Point; to the blue land force entrenched
behind Gaines, and to the dunes east of Morgan, where similar besiegers
would undoubtedly soon be landed.
"Yes ... Yes," she said to his few explanations. It was all so sadly
clear.