CHAPTER XVI—THE EIGHTH OF JANUARY
BACK to his negroes and mules and carts and scrapers goes the General, and sets them to renewed hard labor on those immortal mud walls which he will never get too high. Those cotton bales, so distressing to Papa Plauche and the “Fathers,” are eliminated, at which that paternal commander breathes freer. The hunting-shirt men, with each going down of the sun, resume their nighthawk parties, which swoop upon English sentinels, taking lives and guns.
The English themselves are a prey to dejection. The foe against whom they war is so strange, so savage, so sleepless, so coldly inveterate! Also those incessant night attacks sap their manhood. They build no fires now, but sit in darkness through the nights. A fire is but the attractive prelude to a shower of nocturnal lead, and the woefully lengthening list of dead and wounded tells strongly against it. To even light a cigar after dark is an approach to suicide; and so the English wrap themselves in blackness—very miserable! Their earlier horror of the hunting-shirt men is increased; for they have three times studied backwoods marksmanship from the standpoint of targets, and the dumb chill about their heart-roots is a testimony to its awful accuracy.
The General, who reads humanity as astronomers read the heavens, is not wanting in notions of the gloom which envelops the English like a funeral pall.
“Coffee,” says he, at one of those famous war councils of two, “in their souls we have them beaten. They will fight again; but only from pride. Their hope is gone, Coffee; we have broken their hearts.”
The reports of the General's scouts teach him that the English will put a force across the river. In anticipation, he dispatches Commodore Patterson, with a mixed command of soldiers and sailors, to fortify the west bank. Commodore Patterson emulates the General's four-foot mud walls and throws up a redoubt of his own, mounting thereon twelve eighteen-pounders taken from the Louisiana.
He tries one on the English opposite. The result is gratifying; the gum pitches a solid shot all across the Mississippi and into the English lines.
Eight days pass by in Indian file, and Sir Edward Pakenham with his English feels that, for his safety as much as his honor, he must attack the General, whose mud walls increase with each new sunset. The General foresees this, and has reports of Sir Edward's movements brought him every hour.
On the morning of the eighth the General's scouts wake him at two o'clock and say that the English are astir. He is instantly abroad; the word goes down the line; by four o'clock every rifle is ready, each hunting-shirt man at his post.
The weak spot, the one at which Sir Edward will level his utmost force, is where the General's line finds an end in the moss-hung cypress swamp. It is there he stations the reliable Coffee with his hunting-shirt men. To the rear, as a reserve, is General Adair with what Kentuckians the good, unerring offices of those night-prowling hunting-shirt men have armed at the red expense of the English.