Kincaid's Battery Read online

  KINCAID'S BATTERY

  BY

  GEORGE W. CABLE

  1908

  ILLUSTRATED BY

  ALONZO KIMBALL

  "If anyone alive," he cried, "knows any cause why thisthing should not be."]

  To

  E.C.S.C.

  CONTENTS

  I. Carrollton Gardens II. Carriage Company III. The General's Choice IV. Manoeuvres V. Hilary?--Yes, Uncle? VI. Messrs. Smellemout and Ketchem VII. By Starlight VIII. One Killed IX. Her Harpoon Strikes X. Sylvia Sighs XI. In Column of Platoons XII. Mandeville Bleeds XIII. Things Anna Could Not Write XIV. Flora Taps Grandma's Cheek XV. The Long Month of March XVI. Constance Tries to Help XVII. "Oh, Connie, Dear--Nothing--Go On" XVIII. Flora Tells the Truth! XIX. Flora Romances XX. The Fight for the Standard XXI. Constance Cross-Examines XXII. Same Story Slightly Warped XXIII. "Soldiers!" XXIV. A Parked Battery Can Raise a Dust XXV. "He Must Wait," Says Anna XXVI. Swift Going, Down Stream XXVII. Hard Going, Up Stream XXVIII. The Cup of Tantalus XXIX. A Castaway Rose XXX. Good-by, Kincaid's Battery XXXI. Virginia Girls and Louisiana Boys XXXII. Manassas XXXIII. Letters XXXIV. A Free-Gift Bazaar XXXV. The "Sisters of Kincaid's Battery" XXXVI. Thunder-Cloud and Sunburst XXXVII. "Till He Said, 'I'm Come Hame, My Love'"XXXVIII. Anna's Old Jewels XXXIX. Tight Pinch XL. The License, The Dagger XLI. For an Emergency XLII. "Victory! I Heard it as PI'--" XLIII. That Sabbath at Shiloh XLIV. "They Were all Four Together" XLV. Steve--Maxime--Charlie-- XLVI. The School of Suspense XLVII. From the Burial Squad XLVIII. Farragut XLIX. A City in Terror L. Anna Amazes Herself LI. The Callender Horses Enlist LII. Here They Come LIII. Ships, Shells, and Letters LIV. Same April Day Twice LV. In Darkest Dixie and Out LVI. Between the Millstones LVII. Gates of Hell and Glory LVIII. Arachne LIX. In a Labyrinth LX. Hilary's Ghost LXI. The Flag-of-Truce Boat LXII. Farewell, Jane! LXIII. The Iron-clad Oath LXIV. "Now, Mr. Brick-Mason--" LXV. Flora's Last Throw LXVI. "When I Hands in My Checks" LXVII. Mobile LXVIII. By the Dawn's Early Light LXIX. Southern Cross and Northern Star LXX. Gains and Losses LXXI. Soldiers of Peace

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  "If any one alive," he cried, "knows any cause why this thing should notbe"

  Anna

  "'Tis good-by, Kincaid's Battery"

  And the next instant she was in his arms

  "No! not under this roof--nor in sight of _these things_."

  "You 'ave no ri-ight to leave me! _Ah, you shall not_!"

  She dropped into a seat, staring like one demented.

  Kincaid's Battery

  I

  CARROLLTON GARDENS

  For the scene of this narrative please take into mind a widequarter-circle of country, such as any of the pretty women we are toknow in it might have covered on the map with her half-opened fan.

  Let its northernmost corner be Vicksburg, the famous, on theMississippi. Let the easternmost be Mobile, and let the most southerlyand by far the most important, that pivotal corner of the fan from whichall its folds radiate and where the whole pictured thing opens andshuts, be New Orleans. Then let the grave moment that gently ushers usin be a long-ago afternoon in the Louisiana Delta.

  Throughout that land of water and sky the willow clumps dotting thebosom of every sea-marsh and fringing every rush-rimmed lake were yellowand green in the full flush of a new year, the war year, 'Sixty-one.

  Though rife with warm sunlight, the moist air gave distance and poeticcharm to the nearest and humblest things. At the edges of the greattimbered swamps thickets of young winter-bare cypresses were budding yetmore vividly than the willows, while in the depths of those overflowedforests, near and far down their lofty gray colonnades, the dwarfedswamp-maple drooped the winged fruit of its limp bush in pink andflame-yellow and rose-red masses until it touched its own image in thestill flood.

  That which is now only the "sixth district" of greater New Orleans wasthen the small separate town of Carrollton. There the vast Mississippi,leaving the sugar and rice fields of St. Charles and St. John Baptistparishes and still seeking the Gulf of Mexico, turns from east to southbefore it sweeps northward and southeast again to give to the Creolecapital its graceful surname of the "Crescent City." Mile-wide, brimful,head-on and boiling and writhing twenty fathoms deep, you could easilyhave seen, that afternoon, why its turfed levee had to be eighteen feethigh and broad in proportion. So swollen was the flood that from anydeck of a steamboat touching there one might have looked down upon thewhole fair still suburb.

  Widely it hovered in its nest of rose gardens, orange groves, avenues ofwater-oaks, and towering moss-draped pecans. A few hundred yards fromthe levee a slender railway, coming from the city, with a highway oneither side, led into its station-house; but mainly the eye would havedwelt on that which filled the interval between the nearer high road andthe levee--the "Carrollton Gardens."

  At a corner of these grounds closest to the railway station stood aquiet hotel from whose eastern veranda it was but a step to the centreof a sunny shell-paved court where two fountains danced and tinkled toeach other. Along its farther bound ran a vine-clad fence where a row ofsmall tables dumbly invited the flushed visitor to be inwardly cooled.By a narrow gate in this fence, near its townward end, a shelled walklured on into a musky air of verdurous alleys that led and misled,crossed, doubled, and mazed among flowering shrubs from bower to bower.Out of sight in there the loiterer came at startling moments face toface with banks of splendid bloom in ravishing negligee--Diana disrobed,as it were, while that untiring sensation-hunter, the mocking-bird,leaped and sang and clapped his wings in a riot of scandalous mirth.

  In the ground-floor dining-room of that unanimated hotel sat an oldgentleman named Brodnax, once of the regular army, a retired veteran ofthe Mexican war, and very consciously possessed of large means. He satquite alone, in fine dress thirty years out of fashion, finishing a latelunch and reading a newspaper; a trim, hale man not to be called old inhis own hearing. He had read everything intended for news orentertainment and was now wandering in the desert of the advertisingcolumns, with his mind nine miles away, at the other end of New Orleans.

  Although not that person whom numerous men of his acquaintance had begunaffectionately to handicap with the perilous nickname of "the ladies'man," he was thinking of no less than five ladies; two of one name andthree of another. Flora Valcour and her French grandmother (as well asher brother of nineteen, already agog to be off in the war) had butlately come to New Orleans, from Mobile. On a hilly border of thatsmaller Creole city stood the home they had left, too isolated, with warthreatening, for women to occupy alone. Mrs. Callender was the youngwidow of this old bachelor's life-long friend, the noted judge of thatname, then some two years deceased. Constance and Anna were herstep-daughters, the latter (if you would believe him) a counterpart ofher long-lost, beautiful mother, whose rejection of the soldier's suit,when he was a mere lieutenant, was the well-known cause of hissingleness. These Callender ladies, prompted by him and with a sweetmodesty of quietness, had just armed a new field battery with its sixsplendid brass guns, and it was around these three Callenders that hisponderings now hung; especially around Anna and in reference to his muchoverprized property and two nephews: Adolphe Irby, for whom he hadobtained the command of this battery, which he was to see him drill thisafternoon, and Hilary Kincaid, who had himself cast the guns and who wasto help the senior cousin conduct these evolutions.

  The lone reader's glance loitered down a long row of slim paragraphs,each beginning with the same wee picture of a steamboat whether itproclaimed the _Grand Duke_ or the _Louis d'Or_, the _Ingomar_ bound forthe "Lower Coast," or the _Natchez_ for "Vicksburg and the Be
nds."Shifting the page, he read of the Swiss Bell-Ringers as back again"after a six years' absence," and at the next item really knew what heread. It was of John Owens' appearance, every night, as _Caleb Plummer_in "Dot," "performance to begin at seven o'clock." Was it there Adolphewould this evening take his party, of which the dazzling Flora would beone and Anna, he hoped, another? He had proposed this party to Adolphe,agreeing to bear its whole cost if the nephew would manage to include init Anna and Hilary. And Irby had duly reported complete success anddrawn on him, but the old soldier still told his doubts to thenewspaper.

  "Adolphe has habits," he meditated, "but success is not one of them."

  Up and down a perpendicular procession on the page he every now and thenmentally returned the salute of the one little musketeer of the sameheight as the steamboat's chimneys, whether the Attention he challengedwas that of the Continentals, the Louisiana Grays, Orleans Cadets,Crescent Blues or some other body of blithe invincibles. Yet his thoughtwas still of Anna. When Adolphe, last year, had courted her, and thehopeful uncle had tried non-intervention, she had declined him--"and oh,how wisely!" For then back to his native city came Kincaid after yearsaway at a Northern military school and one year across the ocean, andthe moment the uncle saw him he was glad Adolphe had failed. But now ifshe was going to find Hilary as light-headed and cloying as Adolphe wasthick-headed and sour, or if she must see Hilary go soft on the slimMobile girl--whom Adolphe was already so torpidly enamoredof--"H-m-m-m!"

  Two young men who had tied their horses behind the hotel crossed thewhite court toward the garden. They also were in civil dress, yet worean air that goes only with military training. The taller was HilaryKincaid, the other his old-time, Northern-born-and-bred school chum,Fred Greenleaf. Kincaid, coming home, had found him in New Orleans, onduty at Jackson Barracks, and for some weeks they had enjoyed cronying.Now they had been a day or two apart and had chanced to meet again atthis spot. Kincaid, it seems, had been looking at a point hard by with aview to its fortification. Their manner was frankly masterful thoughthey spoke in guarded tones.

  "No," said Kincaid, "you come with me to this drill. Nobody'll takeoffence."

  "Nor will you ever teach your cousin to handle a battery," repliedGreenleaf, with a sedate smile.

  "Well, he knows things we'll never learn. Come with me, Fred, else Ican't see you till theatre's out--if I go there with her--and you say--"

  "Yes, I want you to go with her," murmured Greenleaf, so solemnly thatKincaid laughed outright.

  "But, after the show, of course," said the laugher, "you and I'll ride,eh?" and then warily, "You've taken your initials off all your stuff?...Yes, and Jerry's got your ticket. He'll go down with your things, checkthem all and start off on the ticket himself. Then, as soon as you--"

  "But will they allow a slave to do so?"

  "With my pass, yes; 'Let my black man, Jerry--'"

  The garden took the pair into its depths a moment too soon for the oldsoldier to see them as he came out upon the side veranda with a cloud onhis brow that showed he had heard his nephew's laugh.