BATTERY
BY GEORGE W. CABLE



KINCAID'S BATTERY

BY

GEORGE W. CABLE

1908

ILLUSTRATED BY

ALONZO KIMBALL


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 not
be"

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 wide
quarter-circle of country, such as any of the pretty women we are to
know in it might have covered on the map with her half-opened fan.

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

Throughout that land of water and sky the willow clumps dotting the
bosom of every sea-marsh and fringing every rush-rimmed lake were yellow
and 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 poetic
charm to the nearest and humblest things. At the edges of the great
timbered swamps thickets of young winter-bare cypresses were budding yet
more vividly than the willows, while in the depths of those overflowed
forests, near and far down their lofty gray colonnades, the dwarfed
swamp-maple drooped the winged fruit of its limp bush in pink and
flame-yellow and rose-red masses until it touched its own image in the
still flood.

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

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

At a corner of these grounds closest to the railway station stood a
quiet hotel from whose eastern veranda it was but a step to the centre
of a sunny shell-paved court where two fountains danced and tinkled to
each other. Along its farther bound ran a vine-clad fence where a row of
small tables dumbly invited the flushed visitor to be inwardly cooled.
By a narrow gate in this fence, near its townward end, a shelled walk
lured 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 to
face 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 old
gentleman named Brodnax, once of the regular army, a retired veteran of
the Mexican war, and very consciously possessed of large means. He sat
quite alone, in fine dress thirty years out of fashion, finishing a late
lunch and reading a newspaper; a trim, hale man not to be called old in
his own hearing. He had read everything intended for news or
entertainment and was now wandering in the desert of the advertising
columns, with his mind nine miles away, at the other end of New Orleans.

Although not that person whom numerous men of his acquaintance had begun
affectionately to handicap with the perilous nickname of "the ladies'
man," he was thinking of no less than five ladies; two of one name and
three of another. Flora Valcour and her French grandmother (as well as
her brother of nineteen, already agog to be off in the war) had but
lately come to New Orleans, from Mobile. On a hilly border of that
smaller Creole city stood the home they had left, too isolated, with war
threatening, for women to occupy alone. Mrs. Callender was the young
widow of this old bachelor's life-long friend, the noted judge of that
name, then some two years deceased. Constance and Anna were her
step-daughters, the latter (if you would believe him) a counterpart of
her long-lost, beautiful mother, whose rejection of the soldier's suit,
when he was a mere lieutenant, was the well-known cause of his
singleness. These Callender ladies, prompted by him and with a sweet
modesty of quietness, had just armed a new field battery with its six
splendid brass guns, and it was around these three Callenders that his
ponderings now hung; especially around Anna and in reference to his much
overprized property and two nephews: Adolphe Irby, for whom he had
obtained the command of this battery, which he was to see him drill this
afternoon, and Hilary Kincaid, who had himself cast the guns and who was
to 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 it
proclaimed the _Grand Duke_ or the _Louis d'Or_, the _Ingomar_ bound for
the "Lower Coast," or the _Natchez_ for "Vicksburg and the Bends."
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 he
read. It was of John Owens' appearance, every night, as _Caleb Plummer_
in "Dot," "performance to begin at seven o'clock." Was it there Adolphe
would this evening take his party, of which the dazzling Flora would be
one 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 in
it Anna and Hilary. And Irby had duly reported complete success and
drawn on him, but the old soldier still told his doubts to the
newspaper.

"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 then
mentally returned the salute of the one little musketeer of the same
height as the steamboat's chimneys, whether the Attention he challenged
was that of the Continentals, the Louisiana Grays, Orleans Cadets,
Crescent Blues or some other body of blithe invincibles. Yet his thought
was still of Anna. When Adolphe, last year, had courted her, and the
hopeful uncle had tried non-intervention, she had declined him--"and oh,
how wisely!" For then back to his native city came Kincaid after years
away at a Northern military school and one year across the ocean, and
the moment the uncle saw him he was glad Adolphe had failed. But now if
she was going to find Hilary as light-headed and cloying as Adolphe was
thick-headed and sour, or if she must see Hilary go soft on the slim
Mobile girl--whom Adolphe was already so torpidly enamored
of--"H-m-m-m!"

Two young men who had tied their horses behind the hotel crossed the
white court toward the garden. They also were in civil dress, yet wore
an air that goes only with military training. The taller was Hilary
Kincaid, the other his old-time, Northern-born-and-bred school chum,
Fred Greenleaf. Kincaid, coming home, had found him in New Orleans, on
duty 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 at
this spot. Kincaid, it seems, had been looking at a point hard by with a
view to its fortification. Their manner was frankly masterful though
they spoke in guarded tones.

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

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

"Well, he knows things we'll never learn. Come with me, Fred, else I
can'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 that
Kincaid 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, check
them 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 old
soldier to see them as he came out upon the side veranda with a cloud on
his brow that showed he had heard his nephew's laugh.




II


CARRIAGE COMPANY

Bareheaded the uncle crossed the fountained court, sat down at a table
and read again. In the veranda a negro, his own slave, hired to this
hotel, held up an elegant military cap, struck an inquiring attitude,
and called softly, "Gen'al?"

"Bring it with the coffee."

But the negro instantly brought it without the coffee and placed it on
the table with a delicate flourish, shuffled a step back and bowed low:

"Coffee black, Gen'al, o' co'se?"

"Black as your grandmother."

The servant tittered: "Yas, suh, so whah it flop up-siden de cup it
leave a lemon-yalleh sta-ain."

He capered away, leaving the General to the little steamboats and to a
blessed ignorance of times to be when at "Vicksburg and the Bends" this
same waiter would bring his coffee made of corn-meal bran and muddy
water, with which to wash down scant snacks of mule meat. The listless
eye still roamed the arid page as the slave returned with the fragrant
pot and cup, but now the sitter laid it by, lighted a cigar and mused:--

In this impending war the South would win, of course--oh, God is just!
But