Kincaid's Battery. George Washington Cable
their ponies to their haunches, while Kincaid halted Maxime with Gibbs's revolver, and Greenleaf sprang to the bits of his own and Hilary's terrified horses. For two other men, the Gascon and the Italian, had glided into the scene from the willows, and the Gascon was showing Greenleaf two big knives, one of which he fiercely begged him to accept.
"Take it, Fred!" cried Hilary while he advanced on the defiantly retreating Maxime; but as he spoke a new cry of the drovers turned his glance another way. Gibbs had risen to his knees unaware that the Italian, with yet another knife, was close behind him. At a bound Hilary arrested the lifted blade and hurled its wielder aside, who in the next breath seemed to spring past him head first, fell prone across the prostrate Gibbs, turned face upward, and slid on and away--lassoed. Both bull-drivers clattered off up the road.
"Hang to the nags, Fred!" cried Hilary, and let Maxime leap to Gibbs's side, but seized the Gascon as with murderous intent he sprang after him. It took Kincaid's strength to hold him, and Gibbs and his partner would have edged away, but--"Stand!" called Hilary, and they stood, Gibbs weak and dazed, yet still spouting curses. The Gascon begged in vain to be allowed to follow the bull-drivers.
"Stay here!" said Hilary in French, and the butcher tarried. Hilary passed the revolver to his friend, mounted and dashed up the highway.
The Gascon stayed with a lively purpose which the enfeebled Gibbs was the first to see. "Stand back, you hell-hound!" cried the latter, and with fresh oaths bade Greenleaf "keep him off!"
Maxime put Gibbs on Greenleaf's horse (as bidden), and was about to lead him, when Kincaid galloped back.
"Fred," exclaimed Hilary, "they've killed the poor chap." He wheeled. "Come, all hands," he continued, and to Greenleaf added as they went, "He's lying up here in the road with--"
Greenleaf picked up something. "Humph!" said Hilary, receiving it, "knives by the great gross. He must have used this trying to cut the lasso; the one he had back yonder flew into the pond." He reined in: "Here's where they--Why, Fred--why, I'll swear! They've come back and--Stop! there was a skiff"--he moved to the levee and peered over--"It's gone!"
The case was plain, and while from Greenleaf's saddle Gibbs broke into frantic revilings of the fugitives for deserting him and Maxime to sink their dead in the mid-current of the fog-bound river, Kincaid and his friend held soft counsel. Evidently the drovers had turned their horses loose, knowing they would go to their stable. No despatch to stop Greenleaf could be sent by anyone up the railroad till the Committee of Public Safety had authorized it, so Hilary would drop them a line out of his pocket note-book, and by daybreak these prisoners could go free.
"Mr. Gibbs"--he said as he wrote--"I have the sprout of a notion that you and Mr. Lafontaine would be an ornament to a field-battery I'm about to take command of. I'd like to talk with you about that presently." He tore out the page he had written and beckoned the Gascon aside:
"Mon ami"--he showed a roll of "city money" and continued in French--"do you want to make a hundred dollars--fifty now and fifty when you bring me an answer to this?"
The man nodded and took the missive.
The old "Jackson Railroad" avoided Carrollton and touched the river for a moment only, a short way beyond, at a small bunch of flimsy clapboard houses called Kennerville. Here was the first stop of its early morning outbound train, and here a dozen or so passengers always poked their heads out of the windows. This morning they saw an oldish black man step off, doff his hat delightedly to two young men waiting at the platform's edge, pass them a ticket, and move across to a pair of saddled horses. The smaller of the pair stepped upon the last coach, but kept his companion's hand till the train had again started.
"Good-by, Tony," cried the one left behind.
"Good-by, Jake," called the other, and waved. His friend watched the train vanish into the forest. Then, as his horse was brought, he mounted and moved back toward the city.
Presently the negro, on the other horse, came up almost abreast of him. "Mahs' Hil'ry?" he ventured.
"Well, uncle Jerry?"
"Dat's a pow'ful good-lookin' suit o' clo'es what L'tenant Greenfeel got awn."
"Jerry! you cut me to the heart!"
The negro tittered: "Oh, as to dat, I don't 'spute but yone is betteh."
The master heaved a comforted sigh. The servant tittered again, but suddenly again was grave. "I on'y wish to Gawd," he slowly said, "dat de next time you an' him meet--"
"Well--next time we meet--what then?"
"Dat you bofe be in de same sawt o' clo'es like you got on now."
IX
HER HARPOON STRIKES
The home of the Callenders was an old Creole colonial plantation-house, large, square, strong, of two stories over a stoutly piered basement, and surrounded by two broad verandas, one at each story, beneath a great hip roof gracefully upheld on Doric columns. It bore that air of uncostly refinement which is one of the most pleasing outward features of the aloof civilization to which it, though not the Callenders, belonged.
Inside, its aspect was exceptional. There the inornate beauty of its finish, the quiet abundance of its delicate woodwork, and the high spaciousness and continuity of its rooms for entertainment won admiration and fame. A worthy setting, it was called, for the gentle manners with which the Callenders made it alluring.
They, of course, had not built it. The late Judge had acquired it from the descendants of a planter of indigo and coffee who in the oldest Creole days had here made his home and lived his life as thoroughly in the ancient baronial spirit as if the Mississippi had been the mediaeval Rhine. Only its perfect repair was the Judge's touch, a touch so modestly true as to give it a charm of age and story which the youth and beauty of the Callender ladies only enhanced, enhancing it the more through their lack of a male protector--because of which they were always going to move into town, but never moved.
Here, some nine or ten days after Greenleaf's flight, Hilary Kincaid, in uniform at last, was one of two evening visitors, the other being Mandeville. In the meantime our lover of nonsense had received a "hard jolt." So he admitted in a letter to his friend, boasting, however, that it was unattended by any "internal injury." In the circuit of a single week, happening to be thrown daily and busily into "her" society, "the harpoon had struck."
He chose the phrase as an honest yet delicate reminder of the compact made when last the two chums had ridden together.
All three of the Callenders were in the evening group, and the five talked about an illumination of the city, set for the following night. In the business centre the front of every building was already being hung with fittings from sidewalk to cornice. So was to be celebrated the glorious fact (Constance and Mandeville's adjective) that in the previous month Louisiana had seized all the forts and lighthouses in her borders and withdrawn from the federal union by a solemn ordinance signed in tears. This great lighting up, said Hilary, was to be the smile of fortitude after the tears. Over the city hall now floated daily the new flag of the state, with the colors of its stripes--
"Reverted to those of old Spain," murmured Anna, mainly to herself yet somewhat to Hilary. Judge Callender had died a Whig, and politics interested the merest girls those days.
Even at the piano, where Anna played and Hilary hovered, in pauses between this of Mozart and that of Mendelssohn, there was much for her to ask and him to tell about; for instance, the new "Confederate States," a bare fortnight old! Would Virginia come into them? Eventually, yes.
"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" cried Constance, overhearing. (Whatever did not begin with oh, those times,