Kincaid's Battery
Page 62
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 heand his four wan fellows, snatched back from liberty on the eve ofrelease, were prisoners in plain view of the vessel on which they wereto have gone free.
With kind dignity Greenleaf predicted their undoubted return to thecraft next morning. Strange was the difference between this scene andthe one in which, eighteen months before, these two had last beentogether in this room. The sentry there knew the story and enjoyed it.In fact, most of the blue occupants of the despoiled place had aromantic feeling, however restrained, for each actor in that earlierepisode. Yet there was resentment, too, against Greenleaf's clemencies.
"Wants?" said the bedless captive to his old chum, "no, thank you, not awant!" implying, with his eyes, that the cloud overhanging Greenleaf forfavors shown to--hmm!--certain others was already dark enough, "We've_parlor_ furniture galore," he laughed, pointing out a number ofdiscolored and broken articles that had been beautiful. One was thescreen behind which the crouching Flora had heard him tell the ruin ofher Mobile home and had sworn revenge on this home and on its fairestinmate.
During the evening the prisoners grew a bit noisy, in song; yet evenwhen their ditties were helped out by a rhythmic clatter of boot-heelsand chair-legs the too indulgent Greenleaf did not stop them. The voiceswere good and the lines amusing not merely to the guards here and therebut to most of their epauleted superiors who, with lights out forcoolness, sat in tilted chairs on a far corner of the front veranda tocatch 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 isalready full enough. Working in the soft mortar of so new a wall andworked by one with a foundryman's knowledge of bricklaying, the murderedItalian's stout old knife made effective speed as it kept neat time withthe racket maintained for it. When the happiest man in New Orleanswarily put head and shoulders through the low gap he had opened,withdrew them again and reported to his fellows, the droll excess oftheir good fortune moved the five to livelier song, and as one by onethe other four heads went in to view the glad sight the five gave a yetmore tragic stanza from the farewell to Jane. The source of theirdelight was not the great ragged hole just over the intruding heads, inthe ceiling's lath and plaster, nor was it a whole corner torn off thegrand-piano by the somersaulting shell as it leaped from the rent aboveto the cleaner one it had left at the baseboard in the room's fartherend. It was that third hole, burned in the floor; for there it opened,shoulder wide, almost under their startled faces, free to the basement'sfloor and actually with the rough ladder yet standing in it which hadbeen used in putting out the fire. That such luck could last a night wastoo much to hope.
Yet it lasted. The songs were hushed. The room whence they had come waswithout an audible stir. Sleep stole through all the house, through thesmall camp of the guard in the darkened grove, the farther tents of thebrigade, the anchored ships, the wide city, the starlit landscape. Outin that rear garden-path where Madame Valcour had once been taken to seethe head-high wealth of roses two generals, who had been there throughall the singing, still paced to and fro and talked, like old Brodnax atCarrollton in that brighter time, "not nearly as much alone as theyseemed." One by one five men in gray, each, for all his crouching andgliding, 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 backwas turned, went four of the gliding men, as still as bats, over thefence into a city of ten thousand welcome hiding-places. The fifth,their "ringg-leadeh," for whom they must wait concealed until he shouldrejoin them, lingered in the roses; hovered so close to the path that hemight 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 itsreinforcement. Mobile was merely garrisoned. Little was there saveartillery. Here in New Orleans lay thousands of veterans flushed withtheir up-river victories, whose best and quickest aid to Rosecrans wouldbe so to move as to turn Bragg's reinforcements back southward. Acavalry dash across the pine-barrens of East Louisiana to cut therailroad along the Mississippi-Alabama line, a quick joint movement ofland and naval forces by way of the lakes, sound, and gulf, and Mobilewould fall. These things and others, smaller yet more startling, thelistener learned of, not as pastime talk, but as a vivid scheme alreadylaid, a mine ready to be sprung if its secret could be kept three dayslonger; and now he hurried after his four compatriots, his own brainteeming with a counter-plot to convey this secret through the dried-upswamps to the nearest Confederate telegraph station while Anna shouldbear it (and the recovered treasure) by boat to Mobile, two messengersbeing so many times surer than one.
Early next morning Madame Valcour, entering an outer room from an innerone, found Flora writing a note. The girl kept on, conscious that herirksome critic was taking keen note of a subtle, cruel decay of herbeauty, a spiritual corrosion that, without other fault to the eye, hadat last reached the surface in a faint hardening of lines and stalenessof bloom. Now she rose, went out, dispatched her note and returned. Hermanner, as the two sat down to bread and coffee, was bright thoughtense.
"From Greenleaf?" inquired her senior, "and to the same?"
The girl shook her fair head and named one of his fellow-officers atCallender House: "No, Colonel Greenleaf is much too busy. Hilary Kincaidhas--"
"Esca-aped?" cried the aged one, flashed hotly, laughed, flashed againand smiled. "That Victorine kitten--with her cakes! And you--andGreenleaf--hah! you three cats paws--of one little--Anna!"
Flora jauntily wagged a hand, then suddenly rose and pointed with a bigbread 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 turnedto a window--"for Anna, spite of all we can do, I am af-raid--ShipIsland! Poor _Anna!_" At the name her beautiful arm, in one swiftmotion, soared, swung, drove the bright steel deep into the window-frameand left it quivering.
"Really," said a courteous staff-officer as he and Doctor Sevieralighted at the garden stair of Callender House and helped Anna and hermaid from a public carriage, "only two or three of us will knowyou're"--His smile was awkward. The pale doctor set his jaw. Annamusingly supplied the term:
"A prisoner." She looked fondly over the house's hard-used front as theymounted the steps. "If they'd keep me here, Doctor," she said at thetop, "I'd be almost happy. But"--she faced the aide-de-camp--"theywon't, you know. By this time to-morrow I shall be"--she wavedplayfully--"far away."
"Mainland, or island?" grimly asked the Doctor.
She did not know. "But I know, now, how a rabbit feels with the houndsafter her. Honestly," she said again to the officer, "I wish I mighthave her cunning." And the soldier murmured, "Amen."