Toward evening, some of the enemy's batteries were silent, and we idlers once more sought the hurricane deck, dodging behind the pilot-house whenever the smoke puffed from the hostile guns. Once, some one cried, "There she comes!" and we dropped as usual. Looking up, I noticed a second engineer standing beside me.
"Lie down, Blakely!" I said, sharply.
He replied laughingly, with his hands in his pockets:
"O no, there is no need of it; one is just as safe here."
While he spoke, the Rebel shot passed within fifteen inches of his bloodless face, shaved a sheet-iron ventilator, tore through the chimney, severed a large wrought-iron rod, struck the deck, plowed through a half-inch iron plate, neatly cutting it in two, passed under the next plate, and then came out again, with its force spent, and rolled languidly against a sky-light. When he felt the rush of air, Blakely bent back almost double, and thereafter he was among the first to seek the shelter of the pilot-house.
Fifty Shots to the Minute.
From the mortars and the guns on both sides, there were sometimes fifty shots to the minute. The jarrings and explosions induced head-ache for hours afterward. The results of the day's bombardment were not very sanguinary. Our iron-clads were struck scores of times, but few men were injured. This desultory fighting was kept up for two or three weeks.
Meanwhile, General Pope, moving across the country from Cairo with great enterprise and activity, had defeated the Rebels and captured their forts at New Madrid, on the Missouri shore of the Mississippi, eight miles below Island Number Ten. He thus held the river in the rear of the enemy, preventing steamboats from ascending to them; but he had not even a skiff or a raft in which he could cross to the Tennessee bank, and reach the rear of the fortifications. How to supply him with boats was the great problem.
Pope was anxious that the commodore should send one of the iron-clads to him, past the Rebel fortifications. Foote hesitated, as running batteries was then an untried experiment.
Pope had an active, hard-working Illinois engineer regiment, which began cutting a canal, to open communication between the flotilla and New Madrid; and we waited for results.