“Embrace me, brother!” cries Captain Roche in broken utterances, “embrace me! It is perhaps for the last time.”
The brothers Roche embrace, and the “Fathers of Families” are melted by the tableau.
“Sergeant Roche, return to your place!” commands the devoted Captain Roche, and the sergeant, weeping, lapses into the ranks.
The hunting-shirt men, witnesses of these touching scenes, are rude enough to laugh, and by way of parody embrace one another effusively. As they depart through the dark for their station, they break into whispered debate as to whether the theatrical grief of Papa Plauche, the brothers Roche, and the “Fathers of Families” is due to their creole blood, or their city breeding, either, according to the theories of the hunting-shirt men, being calculated to promote the effeminate in a man. While they thus wrangle, there comes an angry hissing whisper from Colonel Coffee, like the hiss of a serpent:
“Silence!”
Every hunting-shirt man is stricken dumb. They move forward like shadows, right flank skirting the cypress swamp. To the far left they hear the moccasined, half-muffled tramp of Colonel Carroll's men—their hunting-shirt brothers from the Cumberland. As they turn a bend in the swamp, they see not a furlong away the flickering and shadow dancing of the watch fires of the tired English. At this every hunting-shirt man makes certain the flint is secure in the hammer of his rifle, and loosens the knife and tomahawk in his rawhide belt.
CHAPTER XIV—THE BATTLE IN THE DARK
AS the hunting-shirt men come within sight of the blinking lights, which polka-dot the sugar stubble in front and mark the bivouac of the English, Colonel Coffee sends the whispered word along the line to halt. At this, the hunting-shirt men crouch in the lee of the cypress swamp, and wait. Colonel Coffee is lying by for the signal which shall tell him to begin.