Kincaid's Battery Part 44

How marvelously fire, din and smoke shriveled up the time, which the captain's small clock so mincingly ticked off. A cabin-boy brought a fragrant tray of breakfast, but the grateful ladies could only laugh at it. There was no moment to observe even the few pretty sail-boats which the fearful import and majesty of the strife lured down about them on the light side-wind.

"Has the Tennessee not fired yet?" anxiously asked Anna, but no one was sure. Across the breeze, that kept the near side of the picture uncurtained, she perfectly saw the Tec.u.mseh close abreast of the flashing, smoke-shrouded fort, the Brooklyn to windward abreast of both, and the Hartford at the Brooklyn's heels with her signal fluttering to all behind, "Close order."

"Why don't the ships--?" Anna had it on her lips to cry, when the whole sunward side of the Brooklyn, and then of the Hartford, vomited fire, iron and blinding, strangling smoke into the water-battery and the fort, where the light air held it. G.o.d's mercy! you could see the cheering of the fleet's crews, which the ear could barely gather out of the far uproar, and just as it floated to the gazers they beheld the Tec.u.mseh turn square toward them and head straight across the double line of torpedoes for the Tennessee.

We never catch all of "whatever happens," and neither Callender saw the brave men in gray who for one moment of horror fled from their own guns in water-battery and fort; but all at once they beheld the Tec.u.mseh heave, stagger, and lurch like a drunkard, men spring from her turret into the sea, the Brooklyn falter, slacken fire and draw back, the Hartford and the whole huddled fleet come to a stand, and the rallied fort cheer and belch havoc into the ships while the Tec.u.mseh sunk her head, lifted her screw into air and vanished beneath the wave. They saw Mobile Point a semicircle of darting fire, and the Brooklyn "athwart the Hartford's hawse"; but they did not see, atom-small, perched high in the rigging of the flag-ship and demanding from the decks below, "why this?" and "why that?" a certain "plain sailor" well known to New Orleans and the wide world; did not see the torpedoes lying in watery ambush for him, nor hear the dread tale of them called to him from the Brooklyn while his ship pa.s.sed astern of her, nor him command "full speed ahead" as he retorted, "d.a.m.n the torpedoes!"

They saw his ship and her small consort sweep undestroyed over the dead-line, the Brooklyn follow with hers, the Mobile gunboats rake the four with a fire they could not return, and behind them Fort Morgan and the other ships rend and shatter each other, shroud the air with smoke and thresh the waters white with shot and sh.e.l.l, shrapnel, canister and grape. And then they saw their own Tennessee ignore the monitors and charge the Hartford. But they beheld, too, the Hartford's better speed avoid the fearful blow and press on up the channel and the bay, though torn and bleeding from her foe's broadside, while her own futilely glanced or rebounded from his impenetrable mail.

Wisely, rightly their boat turned and slowly drew away toward Fort Powell and Cedar Point. Yet as from her after deck they saw the same exploit, at the same murderous cost, repeated by the Brooklyn and another and another great ship and their consorts, while not a torpedo did its work, they tearfully called the hour "glorious" and "victorious" for the Tennessee and her weak squadron, that still fought on. So it seemed to them even when more dimly, as distance and confusion grew and rain-clouds gathered, they saw a wooden ship ram the Tennessee, but glance off, and the slow Tennessee drop astern, allow a sixth tall ship and small consort to pa.s.s, but turn in the wake of the seventh and all but disembowel her with the fire of her great bow gun.

Ah, Anna! Even so, the shattered, steam-scalded thing came on and the last of the fleet was in. Yonder, a mere league eastward, it moved up the bay. Yet proudly hope throbbed on while still Mobile, behind other defenses, lay thirty miles away, while her gunboats still raked the ships, while on Powell, Gaines and Morgan still floated the Southern cross, and while, down in the pa.s.s, still unharmed, paused only for breath the Tennessee.

"Prisoners! they are all our prisoners!" tearfully exulted the fond Callenders. But on the word they saw the scene dissolve into a new one. Through a squall of wind and rain, out from the line of ships, four of their consorts glided away eastward, flashing and howling, in chase of the overmatched gunboats, that flashed and howled in retort as they fled. On the west a Federal flotilla in Mississippi Sound, steaming up athwart Grant's Pa.s.s, opened on Fort Powell and awoke its thunders. Ah, ah! Kincaid's Battery at last! Red, white and red they sent buffet for buffet, and Anna's heart was longing anew for their tall hero and hers, when a voice hard by said, "She's coming back, sir, the Tennessee."

Out in the bay the fleet, about to anchor, turned and awaited the new onset. By the time it was at hand the Mobile gunboats, one burning, one fled, one captured, counted for nothing, yet on crept the Tennessee, still singling out the Hartford, and here the two Callenders, their boat hovering as near Powell and Gaines as it dared, looked on the t.i.tanic melee that fell round her. Like hounds and hunters on a bear robbed of her whelps, seventeen to one, they set upon her so thickly that their trouble was not to destroy one another. Near the beginning one cut her own flag-ship almost to the water-line. The first that smote the quarry--at ten knots speed--glanced and her broadside rolled harmless into the bay, while two guns of her monster adversary let daylight through and through the wooden ship. From the turret of a close-creeping monitor came the four-hundred-and-forty-pound bolt of her fifteen-inch gun, crushing the lone foe terribly yet not quite piercing through. Another wooden ship charged, hit squarely a tearing blow, yet slid off, lay for a moment touching sides with the ironclad, while they lacerated each other like lion and tiger, and then dropped away. The hunted Hartford gave a staggering thrust and futile broadside.

So for an hour went the fight; ships charging, the Tennessee crawling ever after her one picked antagonist, the monitors' awful guns forever pounding her iron back and sides. But at length her mail began to yield, her best guns went silent, her smokestack was down, her steering-chains were gone, Buchanan lay heavily wounded. Of Farragut's twenty-seven hundred men more than a seventh had fallen, victims mainly of the bear and her cubs, yet there she weltered, helpless. From her grim disjointed casemate her valorous captain let down the Southern cross, the white flag rose, and instantly, everywhere, G.o.d's thunder and man's alike ceased, and the merciful heavens smiled white and blue again. But their smile was on the flag of the Union, and mutely standing in each other's embrace, with hearts as nearly right as they could know, Anna and Miranda gazed on the victorious stars-and-stripes and wept.

What caused Anna to start and glance behind she did not know; but doing so she stared an instant breathless and then, as she clutched Miranda for support, moaned to the tall, wasted, sadly smiling, crutched figure that moved closer--

"Oh, Hilary! Are you Hilary Kincaid?"

LXX

GAINS AND LOSSES

They kissed.

It looks strange written and printed, but she did not see how to hold off when he made it so tenderly manful a matter of course after his frank hand-shake with Miranda, and when there seemed so little time for words.

An ambulance drawn by the Callenders' horses had brought him and two or three others down the West Side. A sail-boat had conveyed them from the nearest beach. Here it was, now, in tow beside the steamboat as she gathered headway toward Fort Powell. He was not so weak or broken but he could point rapidly about with his crutches, the old light of command in his eyes, while with recognized authority he spoke to the boat's master and these companions.

He said things freely. There was not much down here to be secret about. Mobile had not fallen. She would yet be fought for on land, furiously. But the day was lost; as, incidentally, might be, at any moment, if not shrewdly handled, this lonesome little boat.

Her captain moved to the pilot-house. Miranda and the junior officers left Hilary with Anna. "Did you say 'the day,'" she softly asked, "or 'the bay'?"

"Both," he murmured, and with his two crutches in one hand directed her eyes: to the fleet anch.o.r.ed midway off Morgan, Gaines, and Powell; to the half-dozen gunboats on Mississippi Sound; to others still out in the Gulf, behind Morgan, off Mobile Point; to the blue land force entrenched behind Gaines, and to the dunes east of Morgan, where similar besiegers would undoubtedly soon be landed.

"Yes ... Yes," she said to his few explanations. It was all so sadly clear.

"A grand fort yet," he musingly called Morgan, "but it ought to be left and blown to fare-you-well to-night before it's surroun--I wish my cousin were there instead of in Gaines. 'Dolphe fights well, but he knows when not to fight and that we've come, now, to where every man we've got, and every gun, counts bigger than to knock out any two of the enemy's. You know Fred's over yonder, don't you? and that Kincaid's Battery, without their field-pieces, are just here in Powell behind her heavy guns?... Yes, Victorine said you did; I saw her this morning, with Constance." He paused, and then spoke lower:

"Beloved?"

She smiled up to him.

"Our love's not through all the fire, yet," he said, but her smile only showed more glow.

"My soul's-mate, war-mate soldier-girl," he murmured on.

"Well?"

"If you stand true in what's before us now, before just you and me, now and for weeks to come, I want your word for it right here that your standing true shall not be for the sake of any vow you've ever made to me, or for me, or with me, in the past, the blessed, blessed past. You promise?"

"I promise," she breathed. "What is it?"

"A thing that takes more courage than I've got."

"Then how will you do it?" she lightly asked.

"By borrowing all yours. May I?"

"You may. Is it to save--our battery?"

"Our battery, yes, against their will, with others, if I can persuade the fort's commander. At low tide to-night when the shoals can be forded to Cedar Point, I shall be"--his words grew hurried--the steamer was touching the fort's pier--the sail-boat, which was to take Anna and Miranda to where the ambulance and their own horses awaited them had cast off her painter--"I shall be the last man out of Powell and shall blow it up. Come, it may be we sha'n't meet again until I've"--he smiled--"been court-martialed and degraded. If I am, we--"

"If you are," she murmured, "you may take me to the nearest church--or the biggest--that day."

"No, no!" he called as she moved away, and again, with a darkening brow, "no, no!"

But, "Yes, yes," she brightly insisted as she rejoined Miranda. "Yes!"

For the horses' sake the ladies went that afternoon only to "Frascati," lower limit of the Sh.e.l.l Road, where, in a small hour of the night Anna heard the sudden boom and long rumble that told the end of Fort Powell and salvation of its garrison.

That Gaines held out a few days, Morgan a few weeks, are heroic facts of history, which, with a much too academic shrug, it calls "magnifique, mais--!" Their splendid armament and all their priceless men fell into their besiegers' hands. Irby, haughtily declining the strictly formal courtesies of Fred Greenleaf, went to prison in New Orleans. What a New Orleans! The mailed clutch on her throat (to speak as she felt) had grown less ferocious, but everywhere the Unionist civilian--the once brow-beaten and still loathed "Northern sympathizer," with grudges to pay and losses to recoup and re-recoup--was in petty authority. Confiscation was swallowing up not industrial and commercial properties merely, but private homes; espionage peeped round every street corner and into every back window, and "A. Ward's" ante-bellum jest, that "a white man was as good as a n.i.g.g.e.r as long as he behaved himself," was a jest no more. Miss Flora Valcour, that ever faithful and daring Southerner, was believed by all the city's socially best to be living--barely living--under "the infamous Greenleaf's" year-long threat of Ship Island for having helped Anna Callender to escape to Mobile. Hence her haunted look and pathetic loss of bloom. Now, however, with him away and with General Canby ruling in place of Banks, she and her dear fragile old grandmother could breathe a little.

They breathed much. We need not repeat that the younger was a gifted borrower. She did other things equally well; resumed a sagacious activity, a two-sided tact, and got Irby paroled. On the anniversary of the day Hilary had played brick-mason a city paper (Unionist) joyfully proclaimed the long-delayed confiscation of Kincaid's Foundry and of Callender House, and announced that "the infamous Kincaid" himself had been stripped of his commission by a "rebel" court-martial. Irby promptly brought the sheet to the Valcours' lodgings, but Flora was out. When she came in, before she could lay off her pretty hat:--

"You've heard it!" cried the excited grandam. "But why so dead-alive? Once more the luck is yours! Play your knave! play Irby! He's just been here! He will return! He will propose this evening if you allow him! Let him do it! Let him! Mobile may fall any day! If you dilly-dally till those accursed Callenders get back, asking, for instance, for their--ha, ha!--their totally evaporated chest of plate--gr-r-r! Take him! He has just shown me his uncle's will--as he calls it: a staring forgery, but you, h-you won't mind that, and the 'ladies' man'--ah, the 'ladies' man,' once you are his cousin, he'll never let on. Take Irby! he is, as you say, a nincomp.o.o.p"--she had dropped into English--"and seldom sober, mais take him! 't is the las' call of the auctioneer, yo' fav-oreet auctioneer--with the pointed ears and the forked black tail."

Flora replied from a mirror with her back turned: "I'll thing ab-out it. And maybee--yes! Ezpecially if you would do uz that one favor, lazd thing when you are going to bed the night we are married. Yez, if you would--ahem!--juz' blow yo' gas without turning it?"

That evening, when the accepted Irby, more nearly happy than ever before in his life, said good-night to his love they did not kiss. At the first stir of proffer Flora drew back with a shudder that reddened his brow. But when he demanded, "Why not?" her radiant shake of the head was purely bewitching as she replied, "No, I haven' fall' that low yet."

When after a day or so he pressed for immediate marriage and was coyly referred to Madame, the old lady affectionately--though reluctantly--consented. With a condition: If the North should win the war his inheritance would be "confiz-cate'" and there would be nothing to begin life on but the poor child's burned down home behind Mobile, unless, for mutual protection, nothing else,--except "one dollar and other valuable considerations,"--he should preconvey the Brodnax estate to the poor child, who, at least, had never been "foun' out" to have done anything to subject property of hers to confiscation.

This transfer Irby, with silent reservations, quietly executed, and the day, hour and place, the cathedral, were named. A keen social flutter ensued and presently the wedding came off--stop! That is not all. Instantly upon the close of the ceremony the bride had to be more lifted than led to her carriage and so to her room and couch, whence she sent loving messages to the bridegroom that she would surely be well enough to see him next day. But he had no such fortune, and here claims record a fact even more wonderful than Anna's presentiment as to Hilary that morning in Mobile Bay. The day after his wedding Irby found his parole revoked and himself, with others, back in prison and invited to take the oath and go free--stand up in the war-worn gray and forswear it--or stay where they were to the war's end. Every man of them took it--when the war was over; but until then? not one. Not even the bridegroom robbed of his bride. Every week or so she came and saw him, among his fellows, and bade him hold out! stand fast! It roused their great admiration, but not their wonder. The wonder was in a fact of which they knew nothing: That the night before her marriage Flora had specifically, minutely prophesied this whole matter to her grandmother, whose only response was that same marveling note of nearly four years earlier--

"You are a genius!"

LXXI

SOLDIERS OF PEACE

In March, 'Sixty-five, the Confederacy lay dying. While yet in Virginia and the Carolinas, at Mobile and elsewhere her armies daily, nightly strove on, bled on, a stricken quiet and great languor had come over her, a quiet with which the quiet ending of this tale is only in reverent keeping.

On Mobile's eastern side Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely, her last defenses, were fighting forty thousand besiegers. Kincaid's Battery was there, and there was heavy artillery, of course, but this time the "ladies' men"--still so called--had field-guns, though but three. They could barely man that number. One was a unit of the original six lost "for them, not by them," at Vicksburg, and lately recovered.

Would there were time for its story! The boys had been sent up the state to reinforce Forrest. Having one evening silenced an opposing battery, and stealing over in the night and bringing off its best gun, they had slept about "her" till dawn, but then had laughed, hurrahed, danced, and wept round her and fallen upon her black neck and kissed her big lips on finding her no other than their own old "Roaring Betsy." She might have had a gentler welcome had not her lads just learned that while they slept the "ladies' man" had arrived from Mobile with a bit of news glorious alike for him and them.