“Sixty-two men killed?” cried Jeanie, in horror.
“Some killed, some wounded; but it tells on the contract just the same. Why, you could have heared ’em poppin’ all over camp.”
The Higginbothams had always been abolitionists; and I felt my ancestors turn in their complacent graves.
“Expect to get Kelly this time?” said Coe.
“Dunno, we’ll see at twelve o’clock, when they’re paid off. It’ll be quite a thing to see, all the same. But the ladies had better stay in their tent. An’ it’s eleven now, so I reckon we’ll go back to camp. See, there go the marshals.”
When we got back to camp Raoul received a telegram. He read it hastily, and crumpled it into his pocket; but, I thought, looked troubled.
Jeanie and I wandered down by the brook side before dinner, and afterward Raoul, Healy, Coe, and I sallied forth to “see the fun.” We were let into the chief commissary’s hut, the front of which, above a strong wooden bar, was open; and before it a great crowd of negroes, singing and dancing, and a hundred others, in a long queue, waiting for their pay. “You kin lie down on the floor ef they git to shootin’,” said General McBride, whom we found there smoking placidly in a cane-seated chair. “Those revolvers won’t carry through the boards.”
It was a curious spectacle, that line of coal-black, stalwart, “swamp” negroes; and then to watch the first human expression—in their case greed—impress their stolid features as they took their pay. Among the crowd we noticed many bearded, well-armed, flannel-shirted mountaineers; these we took to be the moonshiners; and near each one, but loitering as if to avoid attention, one of the made-up negroes; to us now obviously factitious. It was a wonder the moonshiners did not find them out, but that they were intent on other things.
“See, that’s King Kelly,” whispered General McBride. “That big fellow there with the slouched hat and rifle.” Having said this, I was surprised to hear him, when the last man had been paid off, get up and make a speech to the navvies, in which he congratulated them that the camp had at last been freed from that great pest, Kelly; and urged them to save their money and be abstemious. “I am General McBride, of New Orleans——”
“Three cheers for Gineral McBride, of New Orleans!” cried a big mulatto opposite, I thought at a sign from Healy. They were given, not very heartily.