LXVIII
BY THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT
Luck loves to go in mask. It turned out quite as well, after all, thatfor two days, by kind conspiracy of Constance and Miranda, the boat tripwas delayed. In that time no fleet came.
Here at the head of her lovely bay tremblingly waited Mobile, neverbefore so empty of men, so full of women and children. Southward, fromtwo to four leagues apart, ran the sun-beaten, breezy margins ofsnow-white sand-hills evergreen with weird starveling pines, dotted withpretty summer homes and light steamer-piers. Here on the Eastern Shorewere the hotels: "Howard's," "Short's," "Montrose," "Battle's Wharf" andPoint Clear, where summer society had been wont to resort all the wayfrom beloved New Orleans. Here, from Point Clear, the bay, broadeningsouth-westward, doubled its width, and here, by and by, this easternshore-line suddenly became its southern by returning straight westwardin a long slim stretch of dazzling green-and-white dunes, and shut itswaters from the Gulf of Mexico except for a short "pass" of a fewhundred yards width and for some three miles of shoal water between thepass and Dauphin Island; and there on that wild sea-wall's end--MobilePoint--a dozen leagues due south from the town--sat Fort Morgan, keepingthis gate, the port's main ship-channel. Here, north-west from Morgan,beyond this main entrance and the league of impassable shoals, FortGaines guarded Pelican Channel, while a mile further townward FortPowell held Grant's Pass into and out of Mississippi Sound, and herealong the west side, out from Mobile, down the magnolia-shaded Bay ShellRoad and the bark road below it, Kincaid's Battery and the last thousand"reserves" the town's fighting blood could drip--whole platoons of themmere boys--had marched, these two days, to Forts Powell and Gaines.
All this the Callenders took in with the mind's eye as they bent over acandle-lighted map, while aware by telegraph that behind Gaines,westward on Dauphin Island, blue troops from New Orleans had landed andwere then night-marching upon the fort in a black rainstorm. Furthestdown yonder, under Morgan's hundred and fifteen great guns, as Annapointed out, in a hidden east-and-west double row athwart the mainchannel, leaving room only for blockade-runners, were the torpedoes,nearly seventy of them. And, lastly, just under Morgan's north side,close on the channel's eastern edge, rode, with her three smallgunboats, the _Tennessee_, ugly to look at but worse to meet,waiting, watching, as up here in Fort Powell, smiling at the scurvinessof their assignment, watched and waited Kincaid's Battery.
Upstairs the new Steve gently wailed.
"Let me!" cried Anna, and ran.
Constance drew out Mandeville's newspaper. Miranda smiled despairingly.
"I wish, now," sighed the sister, "we'd shown it when we got it. I'vehad enough of keeping things from Nan Callender. Of course, even amongour heroes in prison, there still may be a 'Harry Renard'; but it's farmore likely that someone's telegraphed or printed 'Hilary Kinkaid' thatway; for there _was_ a Herry Renard, Steve says, a captain, in Harper'scalvary, who months ago quietly died in one of our _ownhospitals_--at Lauderdale. Now, at headquarters, Steve says, they'reall agreed that the name isn't a mite more suggestive than the puredaring of the deed, and that if they had to guess who did it they'devery one guess Hilary Kincaid."
She spread the story out on her knee: Exchange of prisoners havingvirtually ceased, a number of captive Confederate officers had beenstarted up the Mississippi from New Orleans, _under_ a heavy _butunwary_ guard, on a "tin-clad" steamer, to wear out the rest of the warin a Northern prison. Forbidden to gather even in pairs, they had yetmoved freely about, often passing each other closely enough to exchangepiecemeal counsels unnoticed, and all at once, at a tap of the boat'sbell had sprung, man for man, upon their keepers and instantly weremasters of them, of them, of their arms stacked on the boiler-deck andof the steamboat, which they had promptly run ashore on the EastLouisiana side and burned. So ran the tale, and so broke off. Ought Annato be told it, or not?
"No," said the sister. "After all, why should we put her again throughall those sufferings that so nearly killed her after Shiloh?"
"If he would only--"
"Telegraph? How do we know he hasn't?"
Next morning the two unencumbered Callenders went down the bay. But theyfound no need to leave the boat. A series of mishaps delayed her, thetide hindered, rain fell, and at length she was told to wait for ordersand so lay all night at anchor just off Fort Gaines, but out of theprospective line of fire from the foe newly entrenched behind it. Therain ceased and, as one of Hilary's songs ran--
"The stars shed forth their light serene."
The ladies had the captain's room, under the pilot-house. Once Annawoke, and from the small windows that opened to every quarter except upthe bay townward looked forth across the still waters and low shores.Right at hand loomed Fort Gaines. A league away north-west rose smallFort Powell, just enough from the water to show dimly its unfinishedparapets. In her heart's vision she saw within it her own Kincaid'sBattery, his and hers. South-eastward, an opposite league away, shecould make out Fort Morgan, but not the Tennessee. The cool, briny airhung still, the wide waters barely lifted and fell. She returned andslept again until some one ran along the narrow deck under her reclosedwindows, and a male voice said--
"The Yankee fleet! It's coming in!"
Miranda was dressing. Out on the small deck voices were quietly audibleand the clink of a ratchet told that the boat was weighing anchor. Sherang three-bells. The captain's small clock showed half-past five. Nowthe swiftly dressed pair opened their windows. The rising sun made agolden path across the tranquil bay and lighted up the three forts andthe starry battlecross softly stirring over each. Dauphin Island andMobile Point were moss-green and pearly white. The long, low, velvetypulsations of the bay were blue, lilac, pink, green, bronze. But angrysmoke poured from the funnels of the Tennessee and her three dwarfconsorts, they four also showing the battle-flag, and some seven milesaway, out in the Gulf, just beyond the gleaming eastern point of SandIsland, was one other sign of unrest.
"You see they're under way?" asked Anna.
Yes, Miranda saw, and sighed with the questioner. For there, oncemore--low crouched, war-painted and gliding like the red savages so manyof them were named for, the tall ones stripped of all their upper spars,but with the pink spot of wrath flickering at every masthead--came theships of Farragut.
The two women could not count them, so straight on were they headed, buta man near the window said there were seven large and seven less, lashedsmall to large in pairs. Yet other counting they did, for now out ofSand Island Channel, just west of the ships, came a shorter line--one,two, three, four strange barely discernible things, submerged likecrocodiles, a hump on each of the first two, two humps on each of theothers, crossed the fleet's course and led the van on the sunward sideto bring themselves first and nearest to Morgan, its water-battery, andthe _Tennessee_.
Anna sighed while to Miranda the man overflowed with information. Ah,ah! in Hampton Roads the _Virginia_ had barely coped with one of thosehorrors, of one hump, two guns; while here came four, whose humps weresix and their giant rifles twelve.
"Twenty-two guns in our whole flotilla," the man was saying to Miranda,"and they've got nearly two hundred." The anchor was up. Gently theboat's engines held her against the flood-tide. The man had turned toadd some word, when from the land side of Gaines a single columbiadroared and a huge shell screamed off into the investing entrenchments.Then some lighter guns, thirty-twos, twenty-fours, cracked and rang, andthe foe replied. His shells burst over and in the fort, and a cloud ofwhite and brown smoke rolled eastward, veiling both this scene and theremoter, seaward, silent, but far more momentous one of Fort Morgan, thefleet, and the _Tennessee_.
The boat crept southward into the cloud, where only Gaines was dimlyvisible, flashing and howling landward. Irby was in that flashing. Stevewas back yonder in Powell with Kincaid's Battery. Through Steve, presentat the reading of a will made at Vicksburg the day after Hilary'scapture there, Irby had just notified Anna, for Hilary, that their unclehad left everything to him,
Adolphe. She hoped it was true, but for oncein her life had doubts without discomfort. How idly the mind can driftin fateful moments. The bell tapped for six. As it did so the twowatchers descried through a rift in the smoke the Tennessee signalingher grim litter, and the four crawling forward to meet the ships. Againthe smoke closed in, but the small boat stole through it and hovered atits edge while the minutes passed and the foe came on. How plain to beseen was each pair, how familiar some of those taller shapes!
"The _Brooklyn_, 'Randa, right in front. And there again is theadmiral's flag, on the _Hartford_. And there, with her topmasts down, isthe _Richmond_--oh, 'Ran', it's the same bad dream once more!"
Not quite. There were ships new to them, great and less, whose savagenames, told by the man near the window, chilled the blood with reminderof old wars and massacres: the _Winnebago, Chickasaw, Octorora, Ossipee,Metacomet, Seminale_. "Look!" said the man, pointing, "the _Tecumseh_--"
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