Kincaid's Battery Part 38

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 sh.e.l.l, last year--"

"Ah, the front? no! The behine, yes, with those two hole' of the sh.e.l.l 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, a.s.sisted 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 rea.s.sured 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 sh.e.l.l 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 bas.e.m.e.nt'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 anch.o.r.ed 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sive 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."