Let us not get dates confused. "On the twenty-ninth of April," says Grant, "the troops were at Hard Times (Arkansas), and the fleet (another fleet), under Admiral Porter, made an attack upon Grand Gulf (Mississippi), while I reconnoitered." But that twenty-ninth was a year later, when New Orleans for three hundred and sixty-five separate soul-torturing days had been sitting in the twilight of her captivity, often writhing and raving in it, starved to madness for news of Lee's and Stonewall's victories and of her boys, her ragged, gaunt, superb, bleeding, dying, on-pressing boys, and getting only such dubious crumbs of rumor as could be smuggled in, or such tainted bad news as her captors delighted to offer her through the bars of a confiscated press. No? did the treatment she was getting merely—as Irby, with much truth, on that twenty-ninth remarked in a group about a headquarters camp-fire near Grand Gulf—did it merely seem so bad to poor New Orleans?

Oh, but!—as the dingy, lean-faced Hilary cried, springing from the ground where he lay and jerking his pipe from his teeth—was it not enough for a world's pity that to her it seemed so? How it seemed to the Callenders in particular was a point no one dared raise where he was. To them had come conditions so peculiarly distressing and isolating that they were not sharers of the common lot around them, but of one strangely, incalculably worse. Rarely and only in guarded tones were they spoken of now in Kincaid's Battery, lately arrived here, covered with the glory of their part in Bragg's autumn and winter campaign through Tennessee and Kentucky, and with Perryville, Murfreesboro' and Stone River added to the long list on their standard. Lately arrived, yes; but bringing with them as well as meeting here a word apparently so authentic and certainly so crushing, (as to those sweet Callenders), that no one ever let himself hint toward it in the hearing even of Charlie Valcour, much less of their battle-scarred, prison-wasted, march-worn, grief-torn, yet still bright-eyed, brave-stepping, brave-riding Major. Major of Kincaid's Battalion he was now, whose whole twelve brass pieces had that morning helped the big iron batteries fight Porter's gunboats.

"Finding Grand Gulf too strong," says Grant, "I moved the army below, running the batteries there as we had done at Vicksburg. Learning here that there was a good road from Bruinsburg up to Port Gibson" (both in Mississippi), "I determined to cross—"

How pleasantly familiar were those names in New Orleans. Alike commercially and socially they meant parterres, walks, bowers in her great back-garden. From the homes of the rich planters around the towns and landings so entitled, and from others all up and down the river from Natchez to Vicksburg and the Bends, hailed many a Carondelet Street nabob and came yearly those towering steamboat-loads—those floating cliffs—of cotton-bales that filled presses, ships and bank-boxes and bought her imports—plows, shoes, bagging, spices, silks and wines: came also their dashing sons and daughters, to share and heighten the splendors of her carnivals and lure away her beaux and belles to summer outings and their logical results. In all the region there was hardly a family with which some half-dozen of the battery were not acquainted, or even related.

"Home again, home again from a foreign shore,"

sang the whole eighty-odd, every ladies' man of them, around out-of-tune pianos with girls whose brothers were all away in Georgia and Virginia, some forever at rest, some about to fight Chancellorsville. Such a chorus was singing that night within ear-shot of the headquarters group when Ned Ferry, once of the battery, but transferred to Harper's cavalry, rode up and was led by Hilary to the commanding general to say that Grant had crossed the river. Piano and song hushed as the bugles rang, and by daybreak all camps had vanished and the gray columns were hurrying, horse, foot, and wheels, down every southerly road to crush the invader.

At the head of one rode General Brodnax. Hearing Hilary among his staff he sent for him and began to speak of Mandeville, long gone to Richmond on some official matter and daily expected back; and then he mentioned "this fellow Grant," saying he had known him in Mexico. "And now," he concluded, "he's the toughest old he one they've got."

On the face of either kinsman there came a fine smile that really made them look alike. "We'll try our jaw-teeth on him to-morrow," laughed the nephew.

"Hilary, you weren't one of those singers last evening, were you?"

"Why, no, uncle, for once you'll be pleased—"

"Not by a dam-site!" The smile was gone. "You know, my boy, that in such a time as this if a leader—and above all such a capering, high-kicking colt as you—begins to mope and droop like a cab-horse in the rain, his men will soon not be worth a—what?... Oh, blast the others, when you do so you're moping, and whether your men can stand it or not, I can't!—what?... Well, then, for God's sake don't! For there's another point, Hilary: as long as you were every night a 'ladies' man' and every day a laugher at death you could take those boys through hell-fire at any call; but if they once get the notion—which you came mighty near giving them yesterday—that you hold their lives cheap merely because you're tired of your own, they'll soon make you wish you'd never set eyes on a certain friend of ours, worse than you or they or I have ever wished it yet."

"I've never wished it yet, uncle. I can't. I've never believed one breath of all we've heard. It's not true. It can't be, simply because it can't be."

"Then why do you behave as if it were?" "I won't, uncle. Honor bright! You watch me." And next day, in front of Port Gibson, through all the patter, smoke, and crash, through all the charging, cheering and volleying, while the ever-thinning, shortening gray lines were being crowded back from rise to rise—back, back through field, grove, hedge, worm-fence and farmyard, clear back to Grindstone Ford, Bayou Pierre, and with the cavalry, Harper's, cut off and driven up eastward through the town—the enraged old brigadier watched and saw. He saw far, saw close, with blasphemous exultation, how Hilary and his guns, called here, sent there, flashed, thundered, galloped, blazed, howled and held on with furious valor and bleeding tenacity yet always with a quick-sightedness which just avoided folly and ruin, and at length stood rock fast, honor bright, at North Fork and held it till, except the cavalry, the last gray column was over and the bridges safely burning.

That night Ned Ferry—of the cavalry withdrawn to the eastward uplands to protect that great source of supplies and its New Orleans and Jackson Railroad—was made a lieutenant, and a certain brave Charlotte, whom later he loved and won, bringing New Orleans letters to camp, brought also such news of the foe that before dawn, led by her, Ferry's Scouts rode their first ride. All day they rode, while the main armies lay with North Fork between them, the grays entrenching, the blues rebridging. When at sundown she and Ned Ferry parted, and at night he bivouacked his men for a brief rest in a black solitude from which the camp-fires of both hosts were in full sight and the enemy's bridge-building easily heard, he sought, uncompanioned, Kincaid's Battery and found Hilary Kincaid. War is what Sherman called it, who two or three days later, at Grand Gulf (evacuated), crossed into this very strife. Yet peace (so-called) and riches rarely bind men in such loving pairs as do cruel toil, deadly perils, common griefs, exile from woman and daily experience of one another's sweetness, valor, and strength, and it was for such things that this pair, loving so many besides, particularly loved each other.

With glad eyes Kincaid rose from a log.

"Major," began the handsome scout, dapper from kepi to spurs in contrast to the worn visage and dress of his senior, but Hilary was already speaking.

"My gentle Ned!" he cried. "Lieutenant—Ferry!"

Amid kind greetings from Captain Bartleson and others the eyes of the two—Hilary's so mettlesome, Ferry's so placid—exchanged meanings, and the pair went and sat alone on the trail of a gun; on Roaring Betsy's knee, as it were. There Hilary heard of the strange fair guide and of news told by her which brought him to his feet with a cry of joy that drew the glad eyes of half the battery.

"The little mother saint of your flag, boys!" he explained to a knot of them later, "the little godmother of your guns!" The Callenders were out of New Orleans, banished as "registered enemies."



LV

IN DARKEST DIXIE AND OUT

Unhappy Callender House! Whether "oppressors" or "oppressed" had earliest or oftenest in that first year of the captivity lifted against it the accusing finger it would be hard to tell.

When the Ship Island transports bore their blue thousands up the river, and the streets roared a new drum-thunder, before the dark columns had settled down in the cotton-yards, public squares, Carrollton suburb and Jackson Barracks, Callender House—you may guess by whose indirection—had come to the notice of a once criminal lawyer, now the plumed and emblazoned general-in-chief, to whom, said his victims (possibly biased), no offense or offender was too small for his hectoring or chastisement.

The women in that house, that nest of sedition, he had been told, at second-hand, had in the very dawn of secession completely armed the famous "Kincaid's Battery" which had early made it hot for him about Yorktown. Later in that house they had raised a large war-fund—still somewhere hidden. The day the fleet came up they had sent their carriage-horses to Beauregard, helped signal the Chalmette fortifications, locked ten slaves in the dwelling under shell fire and threatened death to any who should stir to escape. So for these twelve months, with only Isaac, Ben, and their wives as protectors and the splendid freedom to lock themselves in, they had suffered the duress of a guard camped in the grove, their every townward step openly watched and their front door draped with the stars and stripes, under which no feminine acquaintance could be enticed except the dear, faithful Valcours.

But where were old friends and battery sisters? All estranged. Could not the Callenders go to them and explain? Explain! A certain man of not one-fifth their public significance or "secesh" record, being lightly asked on the street if he had not yet "taken the oath" and as lightly explaining that he "wasn't going to," had, fame said, for that alone, been sent to Ship Island—where Anna "already belonged," as the commanding general told the three gentle refusers of the oath, while in black letters on the whited wall above his judgment seat in the custom-house they read, "No distinction made here between he and she adders."

But could not the Valcours, those strangely immune, yet unquestioned true-lovers of poor Dixie, whose marvelous tact won priceless favors for so many distressed Dixie-ites, have explained for the Callenders? Flora had explained!—to both sides, in opposite ways, eagerly, tenderly, over and over, with moist eyes, yet ever with a cunning lameness that kept convincement misled and without foothold. Had the Callenders dwelt up-town the truth might have won out; but where they were, as they were, they might as well have been in unspeakable Boston. And so by her own sweet excusings she kept alive against them beliefs or phantoms of beliefs, which would not have lived a day in saner times.

Calumny had taken two forms: the monstrous black smoke of a vulgar version and the superior divinings of the socially elect; a fine, hidden flame fed from the smoke. According to the vulgate the three ladies, incensed at a perfectly lawful effort to use their horses for the Confederate evacuation and actually defying it with cocked revolver, had openly abjured Dixie, renounced all purpose to fly to it and, denying shelter to their own wounded, had with signal flags themselves guided the conquering fleet past the town's inmost defenses until compelled to desist by a Confederate shell in their roof. Unable to face an odium so well earned they had clung to their hiding, glad of the blue camp in their grove, living fatly on the bazaar's proceeds, and having high times with such noted staff-officers as Major Greenleaf, their kindness to whom in the days of his modest lieutenancy and first flight and of his later parole and exchange, was not so hard now to see through.

Greenleaf had come back with General Banks when Banks had succeeded Butler. Oppressed with military cares, he had barely time to be, without scrutiny, a full believer in the Valcours' loyalty to the Union. Had they not avowed it to him when to breathe it was peril, on that early day when Irby's command became Kincaid's Battery, and in his days of Parish Prison and bazaar? How well those words fitly spoken had turned out! "Like apples of gold," sang Flora to the timorous grandmother, "in wrappers of greenbacks."

All the more a believer was he because while other faithfuls were making their loyalty earn big money off the government this genteel pair reminding him, that they might yet have to risk themselves inside the gray lines again to extricate Charlie, had kept their loyalty as gracefully hidden as of old except from a general or two. Preoccupied Greenleaf, amiable generals, not to see that a loyalist in New Orleans stood socially at absolute zero, whereas to stand at the social ebullition point was more to the Valcours than fifty Unions, a hundred Dixies and heaven beside. It was that fact, more than any other, save one, which lent intrepidity to Flora's perpetual, ever quickening dance on the tight-rope of intrigue; a performance in which her bonny face had begun to betray her discovery that she could neither slow down nor dance backward. However, every face had come to betray some cruel strain; Constance's, Anna's, even Victorine's almond eyes and Miranda's baby wrinkles. Yes, the Valcours, too, had, nevertheless, their monetary gains, but these were quiet and exclusively from their ever dear, however guilty, "rebel" friends, who could not help making presents to Madame when brave Flora, spurning all rewards but their love, got for them, by some spell they could not work, Federal indulgences; got them through those one or two generals, who—odd coincidence!—always knew the "rebel" city's latest "rebel" news and often made stern use of it.

Full believer likewise, and true sorrower, was Greenleaf, in Hilary's death, having its seeming proof from Constance and Miranda as well as from Flora. For in all that twelvemonth the Callenders had got no glad tidings, even from Mandeville. Battle, march and devastation, march, battle and devastation had made letters as scarce as good dreams, in brightest Dixie. But darkest Dixie was New Orleans. There no three "damned secesh" might stop on a corner in broadest sunlight and pass the time of day. There the "rebel" printing-presses stood cold in dust and rust. There churches were shut and bayonet-guarded because their ministers would not read the prayers ordered by the "oppressor," and there, for being on the street after nine at night, ladies of society, diners-out, had been taken to the lock-up and the police-court. In New Orleans all news but bad news was contraband to any "he or she adder," but four-fold contraband to the Callenders, the fairest member of whose trio, every time a blue-and-gold cavalier forced her conversation, stung him to silence with some word as mild as a Cordelia's. And yet,(you demur,) in the course of a whole year, by some kind luck, surely the blessed truth—Ah, the damsel on the tight-rope took care against that! It was part of her dance to drop from that perch as daintily as a bee-martin way-laying a hive, devour each home-coming word as he devours bees, and flit back and twitter and flutter as a part of all nature's harmony, though in chills of dismay at her peril and yet burning to go to Hilary, from whom this task alone forever held her away.

So throughout that year Anna had been to Greenleaf the veiled widow of his lost friend, not often or long, and never blithely met; loved more ardently than ever, more reverently; his devotion holding itself in a fancied concealment transparent to all; he defending and befriending her, yet only as he could without her knowledge, and incurring-a certain stigma from his associates and superiors, if not an actual distrust. A whole history of itself would be the daily, nightly, monthly war of passions between him, her, Flora, and those around them, but time flies.

One day Greenleaf, returning from a week-long circuit of outposts, found awaiting him a letter bearing Northern imprints of mailing and forwarding, from Hilary Kincaid, written long before in prison and telling another whole history, of a kind so common in war that we have already gone by it; a story of being left for dead in the long stupor of a brain hurt; of a hairbreadth escape from living burial; of weeks in hospital unidentified, all sense of identity lost; and of a daring feat of surgery, with swift mental, not so swift bodily, recovery. Inside the letter was one to Anna. But Anna was gone. Two days earlier, without warning, the Callenders—as much to Flora's affright as to their relief, and "as much for Fred's good as for anything," said his obdurate general when Flora in feigned pity pleaded for their stay—had been deported into the Confederacy.

"Let me carry it to her," cried Flora to Greenleaf, rapturously clasping the letter and smiling heroically. "We can overtague them, me and my gran'mama! And then, thanks be to God! my brother we can bring him back! Maybe also—ah! maybee! I can obtain yo' generals some uzeful news!"

After some delay the pair were allowed to go. At the nearest gray outpost, in a sudden shower of the first true news for a week—the Mississippi crossed, Grant victorious at Port Gibson and joined by Sherman at Grand Gulf—Flora learned, to her further joy, that the Callenders, misled by report that Brodnax's brigade was at Mobile, had gone eastward, as straight away from Brodnax and the battery as Gulf-shore roads could take them, across a hundred-mile stretch of townless pine-barrens with neither railway nor telegraph.

Northward, therefore, with Madame on her arm, sprang Flora, staggeringly, by the decrepit Jackson Railroad, along the quiet eastern bound of a region out of which, at every halt, came gloomy mention of Tallahala River and the Big Black; of Big Sandy, Five Mile and Fourteen Mile creeks; of Logan, Sherman and Grant; of Bowen, Gregg, Brodnax and Harper, and of daily battle rolling northward barely three hours' canter away. So they reached Jackson, capital of the state and base of General Joe Johnston's army. They found it in high ferment and full of stragglers from a battle lost that day at Raymond scarcely twenty miles down the Port Gibson road, and on the day following chanced upon Mandeville returning at last from Richmond. With him they turned west, again by rail, and about sundown, at Big Black Bridge, ten miles east of Vicksburg, found themselves clasping hands in open air with General Brodnax, Irby and Kincaid, close before the torn brigade and the wasted, cheering battery. Angels dropped down they seemed, tenderly begging off from all talk of the Callenders, who, Flora distressfully said, had been "grozzly exaggerated," while, nevertheless, she declared herself, with starting tears, utterly unable to explain why on earth they had gone to Mobile—"unlezz the bazaar." No doubt, however, they would soon telegraph by way of Jackson. But next day, while she, as mistress of a field hospital, was winning adoration on every side, Jackson, only thirty miles off but with every wire cut, fell, clad in the flames of its military factories, mills, foundries and supplies and of its eastern, Pearl River, bridge.



LVI

BETWEEN THE MILLSTONES

Telegraph! They had been telegraphing for days, but their telegrams have not yet been delivered.

On the evening when the camps of Johnston and Grant with burning Jackson between them put out half the stars a covered carriage, under the unsolicited escort of three or four gray-jacketed cavalrymen and driven by an infantry lad seeking his command after an illness at home, crossed Pearl River in a scow at Ratcliff's ferry just above the day's battlefield.

"When things are this bad," said the boy to the person seated beside him and to two others at their back, his allusion being to their self-appointed guard, "any man you find straggling to the front is the kind a lady can trust."

This equipage had come a three hours' drive, from the pretty town of Brandon, nearest point to which a railway train from the East would venture, and a glimpse into the vehicle would have shown you, behind Constance and beside Miranda, Anna, pale, ill, yet meeting every inquiry with a smiling request to push on. They were attempting a circuit of both armies to reach a third, Pemberton's, on the Big Black and in and around Vicksburg.

Thus incited they drove on in the starlight over the gentle hills of Madison county and did not accept repose until they had put Grant ten miles behind and crossed to the south side of the Vicksburg and Jackson Railroad at Clinton village with only twenty miles more between them and Big Black Bridge. The springs of Anna's illness were more in spirit than body. Else she need not have lain sleepless that night at Clinton's many cross-roads, still confronting a dilemma she had encountered in Mobile.

In Mobile the exiles had learned the true whereabouts of the brigade, 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.

Yet in the midst of the graveyard rites there broke out on the unseen lines near by, northward, an uproar of attack, and one or two shells burst in plain view, frightening the teams. The company leaped into the vehicles any way they could and started townward over a miserable road with the contest resounding on their right. As they jostled along the edge of a wood that lay between them and the firing some mishap to the front team caused all to alight, whereupon a shell, faultily timed, came tearing through the tree-tops and exploded in the remains of a fence close beyond them. Amid thunder, smoke, and brute and human terror the remounting groups whirled away and had entirely left the scene before that was asked which none could tell: Where was Anna?

Anna herself did not know, could not inquire of her own mind. With a consciousness wholly disembodied she was mainly aware of a great pain that seemed to fill all the region and atmosphere, an atmosphere charged with mysterious dim green light and full of great boomings amid a crackle of smaller ones; of shouts and cheers and of a placid quaking of myriad leaves; all of which things might be things or only divers manifestations of her undefinable self.

By and by through the pain came a dream of some one like her living in a certain heaven of comfort and beauty, peace, joy, and love named "Callender House"; but the pain persisted and the dream passed into a horrible daytime darkness that brought a sense of vast changes near and far; a sense of many having gone from that house, and of many having most forbiddenly come to it; a sense of herself spending years and years, and passing from world to world, in quest of one Hilary, Hilary Kincaid, whom all others believed to be dead or false, or both, but who would and should and must be found, and when found would be alive and hale and true; a sense of having, with companions, been all at once frightfully close to a rending of the sky, and of having tripped as she fled, of having fallen and lain in a thunderous storm of invisible hail, and of having after a time risen again and staggered on, an incalculable distance, among countless growing things, fleeing down-hill, too weak to turn up-hill, till suddenly the whole world seemed to strike hard against something that sent it reeling backward.

And now her senses began feebly to regather within truer limits and to tell her she was lying on the rooty ground of a thicket. Dimly she thought to be up and gone once more, but could get no farther than the thought although behind her closed lids glimmered a memory of deadly combat. Its din had passed, but there still sounded, just beyond this covert, fierce commands of new preparation, and hurried movements in response—a sending and bringing, dismissing, and summoning of men and things to rear or front, left or right, in a fury of supply and demand.

Ah, what! water? in her face? Her eyes opened wildly. A man was kneeling beside her. He held a canteen; an armed officer in the foe's blue. With lips parting to cry out she strove to rise and fly, but his silent beseechings showed him too badly hurt below the knees to offer aid or hindrance, and as she gained her feet she let him plead with stifled eagerness for her succor from risks of a captivity which, in starving Vicksburg and in such plight, would be death.

He was a stranger and an enemy, whose hurried speech was stealthy and whose eyes went spying here and there, but so might it be just then somewhere with him for whom she yet clung to life. For that one's sake, and more than half in dream, she gave the sufferer her support, and with a brow knit in anguish, but with the fire of battle still in his wasting blood, he rose, fitfully explaining the conditions of the place and hour. To cover a withdrawal of artillery from an outer to an inner work a gray line had unexpectedly charged, and as it fell back with its guns, hotly pressed, a part of the fight had swung down into and half across this ravine, for which another struggle was furiously preparing on both sides, but which, for him, in the interval, was an open way of deliverance if she would be his crutch.

In equal bewilderment of thought and of outer sense, pleadingly assured that she would at once be sent back under flag of truce, with compassion deepening to compulsion and with a vague inkling that, failing the white flag, this might be heaven's leading back to Callender House and the jewel treasure, to Mobile and to Hilary, she gave her aid. Beyond the thicket the way continued tangled, rough and dim. Twice and again the stricken man paused for breath and ease from torture, though the sounds of array, now on two sides, threatened at every step to become the cry of onset. Presently he stopped once more, heaved, swayed and, despite her clutch, sank heavily to the ground.

"Water!" he gasped, but before she could touch the canteen to his lips he had fainted. She sprinkled his face, but he did not stir. She gazed, striving for clear thought, and then sprang up and called. What word? Ah, what in all speech should she call but a name, the name of him whose warrant of marriage lay at that moment in her bosom, the name of him who before God and the world had sworn her his mated, life-long protection?

"Hilary!" she wailed, and as the echoes of the green wood died, "Hilary!" again. On one side there was more light in the verdure than elsewhere and that way she called. That way she moved stumblingly and near the edge of a small clear space cried once more, "Hilary!... Hilary!"



LX

HILARY'S GHOST

Faintly the bearer of that name heard the call; heard it rise from a quarter fearfully nearer the foe's line than to his; caught it with his trained ear as, just beyond sight of Irby, Miranda, and others, he stood in amazed converse with Flora Valcour. Fortune, smiling on Flora yet, had brought first to her the terrified funeral group and so had enabled her to bear to Hilary the news of the strange estrayal, skilfully blended with that revelation of Anna's Vicksburg sojourn which she, Flora, had kept from him so cleverly and so long.

With mingled rapture and distress, with a heart standing as still as his feet, as still as his lifted head and shining eyes, he listened and heard again. Swiftly, though not with the speed he would have chosen, he sprang toward the call; sped softly through the brush, softly and without voice, lest he draw the enemy's fire; softly and mutely, with futile backward wavings and frowning and imploring whispers to Flora as in a dishevelled glow that doubled her beauty she glided after him.

Strangely, amid a swarm of keen perceptions that plagued him like a cloud of arrows as he ran, that beauty smote his conscience; her beauty and the worship and protection it deserved from all manhood and most of all from him, whose unhappy, unwitting fortune it was to have ensnared her young heart and brought it to the desperation of an unnatural self-revealment; her uncoveted beauty, uncourted love, unwelcome presence, and hideous peril! Was he not to all these in simplest honor peculiarly accountable? They lanced him through with arraignment as, still waving her beseechingly, commandingly back, with weapons undrawn the more swiftly to part the way before him, his frenzy for Anna drew him on, as full of introspection as a drowning man, thinking a year's thoughts at every step. Oh, mad joy in pitiful employment! Here while the millions of a continent waged heroic war for great wrongs and rights, here on the fighting-line of a beleaguered and starving city, here when at any instant the peal of his own guns might sound a fresh onset, behold him in a lover's part, loving "not honor more," setting the seal upon his painful alias, filching time out of the jaws of death to pursue one maiden while clung to by another. Oh, Anna! Anna Callender! my life for my country, but this moment for thy life and thee! God stay the onslaught this one moment!

As he reached the edge of that narrow opening from whose farther side Anna had called he halted, glanced furtively about, and harkened forward, backward, through leafy distances grown ominously still. Oh, why did the call not come again? Hardly in a burning house could time be half so priceless. Not a breath could promise that in the next the lightnings, thunders, and long human yell of assault would not rend the air. Flora's soft tread ceased at his side.

"Stay back!" he fiercely breathed, and pointed just ahead: "The enemy's skirmishers!"

"Come away!" she piteously whispered, trembling with terror. For, by a glimpse as brief as the catch of her breath, yonder a mere rod or so within the farther foliage, down a vista hardly wider than a man's shoulders, an armed man's blue shoulders she had seen, under his black hat and peering countenance. Joy filled the depth of her heart in the belief that a thin line of such black hats had already put Anna behind them, yet she quaked in terror, terror of death, of instant, shot-torn death that might leave Hilary Kincaid alive.

With smiting pity he saw her affright. "Go back!" he once more gasped: "In God's name, go back!" while recklessly he stepped forward out of cover. But in splendid desperation, with all her soul's battle in her eyes—horror, love, defiance, and rending chagrin striving and smiting, she sprang after him into the open, and clutched and twined his arms. The blue skirmish-line, without hearing, saw him; saw, and withheld their fire, fiercely glad that tactics and mercy should for once agree. And Anna saw.

"Come with me back!" whispered Flora, dragging on him with bending knees. "She's lost! She's gone back to those Yankee, and to Fred Greenleaf! And you"—the whisper rose to a murmur whose pathos grew with her Creole accent—"you, another step and you are a deserter! Yes! to your country—to Kincaid' Batt'ree—to me-me-me!" The soft torrent of speech grew audible beyond them: "Oh, my God! Hilary Kincaid, listen-to-me-listen! You 'ave no right; no ri-ight to leave me! Ah, you shall not! No right—ri-ight to leave yo' Flora—sinze she's tol' you —sinze she's tol' you—w'at she's tol' you!"

In this long history of a moment the blue skirmishers had not yet found Anna, but it was their advance, their soft stir at her back as they came upon their fallen leader, that had hushed her cries. At the rift in the wood she had leaned on a huge oak and as body and mind again failed had sunk to its base in leafy hiding. Vaguely thence she presently perceived, lit from behind her by sunset beams, the farther edge of the green opening, and on that border, while she feebly looked, came suddenly a ghost!



Ah, Heaven! the ghost of Hilary Kincaid! It looked about for her! It listened for her call! By the tree's rough bark she drew up half her height, clung and, with reeling brain, gazed. How tall! how gaunt! how dingy gray! How unlike her whilom "ladies' man," whom, doubtless truly, they now called dead and buried. But what—what—was troubling the poor ghost? What did it so wildly avoid? what wave away with such loving, tender pain? Flora Valcour! Oh, see, see! Ah, death in life! what does she see? As by the glare of a bursting midnight shell all the empty gossip of two years justified—made real—in one flash of staring view. With a long moan the beholder cast her arms aloft and sank in a heap, not knowing that the act had caught Hilary's eye, but willingly aware that her voice had perished in a roar of artillery from the farther brink of the ravine, in a crackle and fall of tree-tops, and in the "rebel yell" and charge.

Next morning, in a fog, the blue holders of a new line of rifle-pits close under the top of a bluff talked up to the grays in a trench on its crest. Gross was the banter, but at mention of "ladies" it purified.

"Johnnie!" cried "Yank," "who is she, the one we've got?" and when told to ask her, said she was too ill to ask. By and by to "Johnnie's" inquiries the blues replied:

"He? the giant? Hurt? No-o, not half bad enough, when we count what he cost us. If we'd known he was only stunned we"—and so on, not very interestingly, while back in the rear of the gray line tearful Constance praised, to her face, the haggard Flora and, in his absence, the wounded Irby, Flora's splendid rescuer in the evening onslaught.

"A lifetime debt," Miranda thought Flora owed him, and Flora's meditative yes, as she lifted her eyes to her grandmother's, was—peculiar.

A few days later Anna, waking in the bliss of a restored mind, and feeling beneath her a tremor of paddlewheels, gazed on the nurse at her side.

"Am I a—prisoner?" she asked.

The woman bent kindly without reply.

"Anyhow," said Anna, with a one-sided smile, "they can't call me a spy." Her words quickened: "I'm a rebel, but I'm no spy. I was lost. And he's no spy. He was in uniform. Is he—on this boat?"

Yes, she was told, he was, with a few others like him, taken too soon for the general parole of the surrender. Parole? she pondered. Surrender? What surrender? "Where are we going?" she softly inquired; "not to New Orleans?"

The nurse nodded brightly.

"But how can we get—by?"

"By Vicksburg? We're already by there."

"Has Vicks—?... Has Vicksburg—fallen?"

The confirming nod was tender. Anna turned away. Presently—"But not Mobile? Mobile hasn't—?"

"No, not yet. But it must, don't you think?"

"No!" cried Anna. "It must not! Oh, it must not! I—if I—Oh, if I—"

The nurse soothed her smilingly: "My poor child," she said, "you can't save Mobile."



LXI

THE FLAG-OF-TRUCE BOAT

September was in its first week. The news of Vicksburg—and Port Hudson—ah, yes, and Gettysburg!—was sixty days old.

From Southern Mississippi and East Louisiana all the grays who marched under the slanting bayonet or beside the cannon's wheel were gone. Left were only the "citizen" with his family and slaves, the post quartermaster and commissary, the conscript-officer, the trading Jew, the tax-in-kind collector, the hiding deserter, the jayhawker, a few wounded boys on furlough, and Harper's cavalry. Throughout the Delta and widely about its grief-broken, discrowned, beggared, shame-crazed, brow-beaten Crescent City the giddying heat quaked visibly over the high corn, cotton, and cane, up and down the broken levees and ruined highways, empty by-ways, and grass-grown railways, on charred bridges, felled groves, and long burnt fence lines. The deep, moss-draped, vine-tangled swamps were dry.

So quivered the same heat in the city's empty thoroughfares. Flowers rioted in the unkept gardens. The cicada's frying note fried hotter than ever. Dazzling thunder-heads towered in the upper blue and stood like snow mountains of a vaster world. The very snake coiled in the shade. The spiced air gathered no freshness from the furious, infrequent showers, the pavements burned the feet, and the blue "Yank" (whom there no one dared call so by word or look), so stoutly clad, so uncouthly misfitted, slept at noon face downward in the high grass under the trees of the public squares preempted by his tents, or with piece loaded and bayonet fixed slowly paced to and fro in the scant shade of some confiscated office-building, from whose upper windows gray captives looked down, one of them being "the ladies' man."

Not known of his keepers by that name, though as the famous Major Kincaid of Kincaid's Battery (the latter at Mobile with new guns), all July and August he had been of those who looked down from such windows; looked down often and long, yet never descried one rippling fold of one gossamer flounce of a single specimen of those far-compassionated "ladies of New Orleans," one of whom, all that same time, was Anna Callender. No proved spy, she, no incarcerated prisoner, yet the most gravely warned, though gentlest, suspect in all the recalcitrant city.

Neither in those sixty days had Anna seen him. The blue sentries let no one pass in sight of that sort of windows. "Permit?" She had not sought it, Some one in gold lace called her "blamed lucky" to enjoy the ordinary permissions accorded Tom, Dick, and Harry. Indeed Tom, Dick, and Harry were freer than she. By reason of hints caught from her in wanderings of her mind on the boat, in dreams of a great service to be done for Dixie, the one spot where she most yearned to go and to be was forbidden her, and not yet had she been allowed to rest her hungry eyes on Callender House. Worse than idle, therefore, perilous for both of them and for any dream of great service, would it have been even to name the name of Hilary Kincaid.

What torture the double ban, the two interlocked privations! Yonder a city, little sister of New Orleans, still mutely hoping to be saved, here Hilary alive again, though Anna still unwitting whether she should love and live or doubt and die. Yet what would they say when they should meet? How could either explain? Surely, we think, love would have found a way; but while beyond each other's sight and hearing, no way could Hilary, at least, descry.

To him it seemed impossible to speak to her—even to Fred Greenleaf had Fred been there!—without betraying another maiden, one who had sealed his lips forever by confessing a heart which had as much—had more right to love than he to live. True, Anna, above all, had right to live, to love, to know; but in simplest honor to commonest manhood, in simplest manhood's honor to all womankind, to Flora, to Anna herself, this knowledge should come from any other human tongue rather than from his. From Anna he needed no explanation. That most mysteriously she should twice have defaulted as keeper of sacred treasure; that she stood long accused, by those who would most gladly have scouted the charge, of leanings to another suitor, a suitor in the blue, and of sympathies, nay, services, treasonous to the ragged standards of the gray; that he had himself found her in the enemy's lines, carried there by her own steps, and accepting captivity without a murmur, ah, what were such light-as-air trials of true love's faith while she was still Anna Callender, that Anna from whom one breath saying, "I am true," would outweigh all a world could show or surmise in accusation?

And Anna: What could she say after what she had seen? Could she tell him—with Flora, as it were, still in his arms—could she explain that she had been seeking him to cast herself there? Or if she stood mute until he should speak, what could he say to count one heart-throb against what she had seen? Oh, before God! before God! it was not jealousy that could make her dumb or deaf to either of them. She confessed its pangs. Yes! yes! against both of them, when she remembered certain things or forgot this and that, it raged in her heart, tingled in the farthest reach of her starved and fever-dried veins. Yet to God himself, to whom alone she told it, to God himself she protested on her knees it did not, should not, could not rule her. What right had she to give it room? Had she not discerned from the beginning that those two were each other's by natural destiny? Was it not well, was it not God-sent to all three, that in due time, before too late, he and she—that other, resplendent she—should be tried upon each other alone —together? Always hitherto she, Anna, had in some way, some degree, intervened, by some chance been thrust and held between them; but at length nature, destiny, had all but prevailed, when once more she—stubbornly astray from that far mission of a city's rescue so plainly hers—had crashed in between to the shame and woe of all, to the gain of no cause, no soul, no sweet influence in all love's universe. Now, meeting Hilary, what might she do or say?

One thing! Bid him, on exchange or escape—if Heaven should grant the latter—find again Flora, and in her companionship, at last unhindered, choose! Yes, that would be justice and wisdom, mercy and true love, all in one. But could she do it, say it? She sprang up in bed to answer, "No-o-o!" no, she was no bloodless fool, she was a woman! Oh, God of mercy and true love, no! For reasons invincible, no! but most of all for one reason, one doubt, vile jealousy's cure and despair's antidote, slow to take form but growing as her strength revived, clear at last and all-sufficing; a doubt infinitely easier, simpler, kinder, and more blessed than to doubt true love. Nay, no doubt, but a belief! the rational, life-restoring belief, that in that awful hour of twilight between the hosts, of twilight and delirium, what she had seemed to see she had but seemed to see. Not all, ah, no, not all! Hilary alive again and grappling with death to come at her call had been real, proved real; the rest a spectre of her fevered brain! Meeting him now—and, oh, to meet him now!—there should be no questionings or explainings, but while he poured forth a love unsullied and unshaken she, scarce harkening, would with battle haste tell him, her life's commander, the one thing of value, outvaluing all mere lovers' love: The fact that behind a chimney-panel of Callender House, in its old trivial disguise, lay yet that long-lost fund pledged to Mobile's defense—by themselves as lovers, by poor war-wasted Kincaid's Battery, and by all its scattered sisters; the fund which must, as nearly on the instant as his and her daring could contrive, be recovered and borne thither for the unlocking of larger, fate-compelling resources of deliverance.

One day Victorine came to Anna with ecstasy in her almond eyes and much news on her lips. "To bigin small," she said, Flora and her grandmother had "arrive' back ag-ain" at dawn that morning! Oddly, while Anna forced a smile, her visitor's eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. So they sat, Anna's smile fading out while her soul's troubles inwardly burned afresh, Victorine's look growing into clearer English than her Creole tongue could have spoken. "I trust her no more," it said. "Long have I doubted her, and should have told you sooner but for—Charlie; but now, dead in love as you know me still to be, you have my conviction. That is all for the present. There is better news."

The ecstasy gleamed again and she gave her second item. These weeks she had been seeking, for herself and a guardian aunt, a passport into the Confederacy and lo! here it lay in her pretty hand.

"Deztitution!" she joyfully confessed to be the plea on which it had been procured—by Doctor Sevier through Colonel—guess!—"Grinleaf!—juz' riturn'" from service in the field.

And how were the destitute pair to go?

Ah! did Anna "rim-emb'r" a despatch-boat of unrivalled speed whose engines Hilary Kin—?

Yes, ah, yes!

On which she and others had once—?

Yes, yes!

And which had been captured when the city fell? That boat was now lying off Callender House! Did Anna not know that her shattered home, so long merely the headquarters of a blue brigade, had lately become of large, though very quiet, importance as a rendezvous of big generals who by starlight paced its overgrown garden alleys debating and planning something of great moment? Doctor Sevier had found that out and had charged Victorine to tell it with all secrecy to the biggest general in Mobile the instant she should reach there. For she was to go by that despatch-boat.

"Aw-dinner-illy," she said, a flag-of-truce craft might be any old tub and would go the short way, from behind the city and across the lakes, not all round by the river and the Chandeleur Islands. But this time—that very morning—a score or so of Confederate prisoners (officers, for exchange) had been put aboard that boat, bound for Mobile. Plainly the whole affair was but a mask for reconnaissance, the boat, swiftest in all the Gulf, to report back at top speed by way of the lakes. But!—the aunt would not go at all! Never having been a mile from her door, she was begging off in a palsy of fright, and here was the niece with a deep plot—ample source of her ecstasy—a plot for Anna, duly disguised, to go in the aunt's place, back to freedom, Dixie, and the arms of Constance and Miranda.

Anna trembled. She could lovingly call the fond schemer, over and over, a brave, rash, generous little heroine and lay caresses on her twice and again, but to know whether this was Heaven's leading was beyond her. She paced the room. She clasped her brow. A full half of her own great purpose (great to her at least) seemed all at once as good as achieved, yet it was but the second half, as useless without the first as half a bridge on the far side of the flood. "I cannot go!" she moaned. For the first half was Hilary, and he—she saw it without asking—was on this cartel of exchange.

Gently she came and took her rescuer's hands: "Dear child! If—if while there was yet time—I had only got a certain word to—him—you know? But, ah, me! I keep it idle yet; a secret, Victorine, a secret worth our three lives! oh, three times three hundred lives! Even now—"

"Give it me, Anna! Give it! Give it me, that sick-rate! I'll take it him!"

Anna shook her head: "Ah, if you could—in time! Or even—even without him, letting him go, if just you and I—Come!" They walked to and fro in embrace: "Dear, our front drawing-room, so ruined, you know, by that shell, last year—"

"Ah, the front? no! The behine, yes, with those two hole' of the shell and with thad beegue hole in the floor where it cadge fiah."

"Victorine, I could go—with you—in that boat, if only I could be for one minute in that old empty front room alone."

Victorine halted and sadly tossed a hand: "Ah! h-amptee, yes, both the front and the back—till yes-the-day! This morning, the front, no! Juz' sinze laz' week they 'ave brick' up bitwin them cloze by that burned hole, to make of the front an office, and now the front 't is o'cupy!"

"Oh, not as an office, I hope?"

"Worse! The worse that can be! They 'ave stop' five prisoner' from the boat and put them yondeh. Since an hour Col-on-el Grinleaf he tol' me that—and she's ad the bottom, that Flora! Bicause—" The speaker gazed. Anna was all joy.

"Because what?" demanded Anna, "because Hil—?"

"Yaas! bicause he's one of them! Ringgleadeh! I dunno, me, what is that, but tha'z what he's accuse'—ringg-leadingg!"

Still the oblivious Anna was glad. "It is Flora's doing," she gratefully cried. "She's done it! done it for us and our cause!"

"Ah-h! not if she know herseff!"

Anna laughed the discussion down: "Come, dear, come! the whole thing opens to me clear and wide!"

Not so clear or wide as she thought. True, the suffering Flora was doing this, in desperate haste; but not for Anna, if she knew herself. Yet when Anna, in equal haste, made a certain minute, lengthy writing and, assisted by that unshaken devotee, her maid, and by Victorine, baked five small cakes most laughably alike (with the writing in ore) and laid them beside some plainer food in a pretty basket, the way still seemed wide enough for patriotism.

Now if some one would but grant Victorine leave to bestow this basket! As she left Anna she gave her pledge to seek this favor of any one else rather than of Greenleaf; which pledge she promptly broke, with a success that fully reassured her cheerful conscience.



LXII

FAREWELL, JANE!

"Happiest man in New Orleans!"

So called himself, to Colonel Greenleaf, the large, dingy-gray, lively-eyed Major Kincaid, at the sentinelled door of the room where he and his four wan fellows, snatched back from liberty on the eve of release, were prisoners in plain view of the vessel on which they were to have gone free.

With kind dignity Greenleaf predicted their undoubted return to the craft next morning. Strange was the difference between this scene and the one in which, eighteen months before, these two had last been together in this room. The sentry there knew the story and enjoyed it. In fact, most of the blue occupants of the despoiled place had a romantic feeling, however restrained, for each actor in that earlier episode. Yet there was resentment, too, against Greenleaf's clemencies.

"Wants?" said the bedless captive to his old chum, "no, thank you, not a want!" implying, with his eyes, that the cloud overhanging Greenleaf for favors shown to—hmm!—certain others was already dark enough, "We've parlor furniture galore," he laughed, pointing out a number of discolored and broken articles that had been beautiful. One was the screen behind which the crouching Flora had heard him tell the ruin of her Mobile home and had sworn revenge on this home and on its fairest inmate.

During the evening the prisoners grew a bit noisy, in song; yet even when their ditties were helped out by a rhythmic clatter of boot-heels and chair-legs the too indulgent Greenleaf did not stop them. The voices were good and the lines amusing not merely to the guards here and there but to most of their epauleted superiors who, with lights out for coolness, sat in tilted chairs on a far corner of the front veranda to catch the river breeze. One lay was so antique as to be as good as new:

"Our duck swallowed a snail, And her eyes stood out with wonder. Our duck swallowed a snail, And her eyes stood out with wonder Till the horns grew out of her tail, tail, tail, Tail, Tail, Tail, Tail, Tail, Tail, And tore it All asunder. Farewell, Jane!

"Our old horse fell into the well Around behind the stable. Our old horse fell into the well Around behind the stable. He couldn't fall all the way but he fell, Fell, Fell, Fell, Fell, Fell, Fell, As far as he was able. Farewell, Jane!"

It is here we may safest be brief. The literature of prison escapes is already full enough. Working in the soft mortar of so new a wall and worked by one with a foundryman's knowledge of bricklaying, the murdered Italian's stout old knife made effective speed as it kept neat time with the racket maintained for it. When the happiest man in New Orleans warily put head and shoulders through the low gap he had opened, withdrew them again and reported to his fellows, the droll excess of their good fortune moved the five to livelier song, and as one by one the other four heads went in to view the glad sight the five gave a yet more tragic stanza from the farewell to Jane. The source of their delight was not the great ragged hole just over the intruding heads, in the ceiling's lath and plaster, nor was it a whole corner torn off the grand-piano by the somersaulting shell as it leaped from the rent above to the cleaner one it had left at the baseboard in the room's farther end. It was that third hole, burned in the floor; for there it opened, shoulder wide, almost under their startled faces, free to the basement's floor and actually with the rough ladder yet standing in it which had been used in putting out the fire. That such luck could last a night was too much to hope.

Yet it lasted. The songs were hushed. The room whence they had come was without an audible stir. Sleep stole through all the house, through the small camp of the guard in the darkened grove, the farther tents of the brigade, the anchored ships, the wide city, the starlit landscape. Out in that rear garden-path where Madame Valcour had once been taken to see the head-high wealth of roses two generals, who had been there through all the singing, still paced to and fro and talked, like old Brodnax at Carrollton in that brighter time, "not nearly as much alone as they seemed." One by one five men in gray, each, for all his crouching and gliding, as true and gallant a gentleman as either of those commanders, stole from the house's basement and slipped in and out among the roses. Along a back fence a guard walked up and down. Two by two, when his back was turned, went four of the gliding men, as still as bats, over the fence into a city of ten thousand welcome hiding-places. The fifth, their "ringg-leadeh," for whom they must wait concealed until he should rejoin them, lingered in the roses; hovered so close to the path that he might have touched its occupants as they moved back and forth; almost—to quote his uncle—

"Sat in the roses and heard the birds sing"—

heard blue birds, in soft notes not twittered, muttered as by owls, revealing things priceless for Mobile to know.

Bragg's gray army, he heard, was in far Chattanooga facing Rosecrans, and all the slim remnants of Johnston's were hurrying to its reinforcement. Mobile was merely garrisoned. Little was there save artillery. Here in New Orleans lay thousands of veterans flushed with their up-river victories, whose best and quickest aid to Rosecrans would be so to move as to turn Bragg's reinforcements back southward. A cavalry dash across the pine-barrens of East Louisiana to cut the railroad along the Mississippi-Alabama line, a quick joint movement of land and naval forces by way of the lakes, sound, and gulf, and Mobile would fall. These things and others, smaller yet more startling, the listener learned of, not as pastime talk, but as a vivid scheme already laid, a mine ready to be sprung if its secret could be kept three days longer; and now he hurried after his four compatriots, his own brain teeming with a counter-plot to convey this secret through the dried-up swamps to the nearest Confederate telegraph station while Anna should bear it (and the recovered treasure) by boat to Mobile, two messengers being so many times surer than one.

Early next morning Madame Valcour, entering an outer room from an inner one, found Flora writing a note. The girl kept on, conscious that her irksome critic was taking keen note of a subtle, cruel decay of her beauty, a spiritual corrosion that, without other fault to the eye, had at last reached the surface in a faint hardening of lines and staleness of bloom. Now she rose, went out, dispatched her note and returned. Her manner, as the two sat down to bread and coffee, was bright though tense.

"From Greenleaf?" inquired her senior, "and to the same?"

The girl shook her fair head and named one of his fellow-officers at Callender House: "No, Colonel Greenleaf is much too busy. Hilary Kincaid has—"

"Esca-aped?" cried the aged one, flashed hotly, laughed, flashed again and smiled. "That Victorine kitten—with her cakes! And you—and Greenleaf—hah! you three cats paws—of one little—Anna!"

Flora jauntily wagged a hand, then suddenly rose and pointed with a big bread knife: "Go, dress! We'll save the kitten—if only for Charlie! Go! she must leave town at once. Go! But, ah, grannie dear,"—she turned to a window—"for Anna, spite of all we can do, I am af-raid—Ship Island! Poor Anna!" At the name her beautiful arm, in one swift motion, soared, swung, drove the bright steel deep into the window-frame and left it quivering.

"Really," said a courteous staff-officer as he and Doctor Sevier alighted at the garden stair of Callender House and helped Anna and her maid from a public carriage, "only two or three of us will know you're"—His smile was awkward. The pale doctor set his jaw. Anna musingly supplied the term:

"A prisoner." She looked fondly over the house's hard-used front as they mounted the steps. "If they'd keep me here, Doctor," she said at the top, "I'd be almost happy. But"—she faced the aide-de-camp—"they won't, you know. By this time to-morrow I shall be"—she waved playfully—"far away."

"Mainland, or island?" grimly asked the Doctor.

She did not know. "But I know, now, how a rabbit feels with the hounds after her. Honestly," she said again to the officer, "I wish I might have her cunning." And the soldier murmured, "Amen."



LXIII

THE IRON-CLAD OATH

Under Anna's passive air lay a vivid alertness to every fact in range of eye or ear.

Any least thing now might tip the scale for life or death, and while at the head of the veranda steps she spoke of happiness her distressed thought was of Hilary's madcap audacity, how near at hand he might be even then, under what fearful risk of recognition and capture. She was keenly glad to hear two men complain that the guard about the house and grounds was to-day a new one awkward to the task. Of less weight now it seemed that out on the river the despatch-boat had shifted her berth down-stream and with steam up lay where the first few wheel turns would put her out of sight. Indoors, where there was much official activity, it relieved her to see that neither Hilary's absence nor her coming counted large in the common regard. The brace of big generals were in the library across the hall, busy on some affair much larger than this of "ourn."

The word was the old coachman Israel's. What a tender joy it was to find him in the wretched drawing-room trying to make it decent for her and dropping his tears as openly as the maid. With what a grace, yet how boldly, he shut the door between them and blue authority. While the girl arranged on a table, for Anna's use, a basket of needlework brought with them he honestly confessed his Union loyalty, yet hurriedly, under his breath, bade Anna not despair, and avowed a devotion to the safety and comfort of "ole mahs's and mis's sweet baby" as then and forever his higher law. He was still autocrat of the basement, dropsied with the favor of colonels and generals, deferential to "folks," but a past-master in taking liberties with things. As he talked he so corrected the maid's arrangement of the screen that the ugly hole in the wall was shut from the view of visitors, though left in range of Anna's work-table, and as Anna rose at a tap on the door, with the gentle ceremony of the old home he let in Doctor Sevier and Colonel Greenleaf and shut himself out.

"Anna," began the Doctor, "There's very little belief here that you're involved in this thing."

"Why, then," archly said Anna, "who is?"

"Ah, that's the riddle. But they say if you'll just take the oath of allegiance—"

Anna started so abruptly as to imperil her table. Her color came and her voice dropped to its lowest note as she said between long breaths: "No!—no!—no!"

But the Doctor spoke on:

"They believe that if you take it you'll keep it, and they say that the moment you take it you may go free, here or anywhere—to Mobile if you wish."

Again Anna flinched: "Mobile!" she murmured, and then lifting her eyes to Greenleaf's, repeated, "No! No, not for my life. Better Ship Island."

Greenleaf reddened. "Anna," put in the Doctor, but she lifted a hand:—

"They've never offered it to you, Doctor? H-oh! They'd as soon think of asking one of our generals. They'd almost as soon"—the corners of her lips hinted a smile—"ask Hilary Kincaid."

"I've never advised any one against it, Anna."

"Well, I do!—every God-fearing Southern man and woman. A woman is all I am and I may be short-sighted, narrow, and foolish, but—Oh, Colonel Greenleaf, you shouldn't have let Doctor Sevier take this burden for you. It's hard enough—"

The Doctor intervened: "Anna, dear, this old friend of yours"—laying a finger on Greenleaf—"is in a tight place. Both you and Hilary—"

"Yes, I know, and I know it's not fair to him. Lieutenant—Colonel, I mean, pardon me!—you sha'n't be under odium for my sake or his. As far as I stand accused I must stand alone. The one who must go free is that mere child Victorine, on her pass, to-day, this morning. When I hear the parting gun of that boat down yonder I want to know by it that Victorine is safely on her way to Mobile, as she would be had she not been my messenger yesterday."

"She carried nothing but a message?"

"Nothing but a piece of writing—mine! Colonel, I tell you faithfully, whatever Major Kincaid broke prison with was not brought here yesterday by any one and was never in Victorine's hands."

"Nor in yours, either?" kindly asked Greenleaf.

Anna caught her breath and went redder than ever. Doctor Sevier stirred to speak, but Anna's maid gave her a soft thrust, pointed behind the screen, and covered a bashful smile with her apron. Anna's blush became one of mirth. Her eyes went now to the Doctor and again to the broken wall.

"Israel!" she laughed, "why do you enter—?"

"On'y fitten' way, missie. House so full o' comin' and goin', and me havin' dis cullud man wid me."

Out on the basement ladder, at the ragged gap of Israel's "on'y fittin' way," was visible, to prove his word, another man's head, white-turbaned like his own, and two dark limy hands passing in a pail of mortar. Welcome distraction. True, Greenleaf's luckless question still stood unanswered, but just then an orderly summoned him to the busy generals and spoke aside to Doctor Sevier.

"Miss Valcour," explained the Doctor to Anna.

"Oh, Doctor," she pleaded, "I want to see her! Beg them, won't you, to let her in?"



LXIV

"NOW, MR. BRICK-MASON,—"

Amid the much coming and going that troubled Israel—tramp of spurred boots, clank of sabres, seeking, meeting and parting of couriers and aides—Madame Valcour, outwardly placid, inwardly terrified, found opportunity to warn her granddaughter, softly, that unless she, the granddaughter, could get that look of done-for agony out of her eyes, the sooner and farther they fled this whole issue, this fearful entanglement, the better for them.

But brave Flora, knowing the look was no longer in the eyes alone but had for days eaten into her visage as age had for decades into the grandam's, made no vain effort to paint it out with smiles but accepted and wore it in show of a desperate solicitude for Anna. Yet this, too, was futile, and before Doctor Sevier had exchanged five words with her she saw that to him the make-up was palpable and would be so to Greenleaf. Poor Flora! She had wrestled her victims to the edge of a precipice, yet it was she who at this moment, this dazzling September morning, seemed doomed to go first over the brink. Had not both Hilary and Anna met again this Greenleaf and through him found answer for all their burning questions? She could not doubt her web of deceptions had been torn to shreds, cast to the winds. Not one of the three could she now hope to confront successfully, much less any two of them together. To name no earlier reason—having reached town just as Kincaid was being sent out of it, she had got him detained on a charge so frivolous that how to sustain it now before Greenleaf and his generals she was tortured to contrive.

Yet something must be done. The fugitive must be retaken and retained, the rival deported, and, oh, Hilary Kincaid! as she recalled her last moment with you on that firing-line behind Vicksburg, shame and rage outgrew despair, and her heart beat hot in a passion of chagrin and then hotter, heart and brain, in a frenzy of ownership, as if by spending herself she had bought you, soul and body, and if only for self-vindication would have you from all the universe.

"The last wager and the last card," she smilingly remarked to her kinswoman, "they sometimes win out," and as the smile passed added, "I wish I had that bread-knife."

To Doctor Sevier her cry was, "Oh, yes, yes! Dear Anna! Poor Anna! Yes, before I have to see any one else, even Colonel Greenleave! Ah, please, Doctor, beg him he'll do me that prizelezz favor, and that for the good God's sake he'll keep uz, poor Anna and me, not long waiting!"

Yet long were the Valcours kept. It was the common fate those days. But Flora felt no title to the common fate, and while the bustle of the place went on about them she hiddenly suffered and, mainly for the torment it would give her avaricious companion, told a new reason for the look in her eyes. Only a few nights before she had started wildly out of sleep to find that she had dreamed the cause of Anna's irreconcilable distress for the loss of the old dagger. The dream was true on its face, a belated perception awakened by bitterness of soul, and Madame, as she sat dumbly marvelling at its tardiness, chafed the more against each minute's present delay, seeing that now to know if Kincaid, or if Anna, held the treasure was her liveliest hankering.

Meantime the captive Anna was less debarred than they. As Greenleaf and the Doctor, withdrawing, shut her door, and until their steps died away, she had stood by her table, her wide thought burning to know the whereabouts, doings, and plight of him, once more missing, with whom a scant year-and-a-half earlier—if any war-time can be called scant—she had stood on that very spot and sworn the vows of marriage: to know his hazards now, right now! with man; police, informer, patrol, picket, scout; and with nature; the deadly reptiles, insects, and maladies of thicketed swamp and sun-beaten, tide-swept marsh; and how far he had got on the splendid mission which her note, with its words of love and faith and of patriotic abnegation, had laid upon him.

Now eagerly she took her first quick survey of the room she knew so well. Her preoccupied maid was childishly questioning the busy Israel as he and the man out on the basement ladder removed bricks from the edges of the ragged opening between them.