When Richling went out the next morning the whole city was in an ecstasy of rage and terror. Thousands had gathered what they could in their hands, and were flying by every avenue of escape. Thousands ran hither and thither, not knowing where or how to fly. He saw the wife and son of the silver-haired banker rattling and bouncing away toward one of the railway depots in a butcher’s cart. A messenger from Kate by good chance met him with word that she would be ready for the afternoon train of the Jackson Railroad, and asking anew his earliest attention to her interests about the lugger landing.
He hastened to the levee. The huge, writhing river, risen up above the town, was full to the levee’s top, and, as though the enemy’s fleet was that much more than it could bear, was silently running over by a hundred rills into the streets of the stricken city.
As far as the eye could reach, black smoke, white smoke, brown smoke, and red flames rolled and spread, and licked and leaped, from unnumbered piles of cotton bales, and wooden wharves, and ships cut adrift, and steam-boats that blazed like shavings, floating down the harbor as they blazed. He stood for a moment to see a little revenue cutter,—a pretty topsail schooner,—lying at the foot of Canal street, sink before his eyes into the turbid yellow depths of the river, scuttled. Then he hurried on. Huge mobs ran to and fro in the fire and smoke, howling, breaking, and stealing. Women and children hurried back and forth like swarms of giant ants, with buckets and baskets, and dippers and bags, and bonnets, hats, petticoats, anything,—now empty, and now full of rice and sugar and meal and corn and syrup,—and robbed each other, and cursed and fought, and slipped down in pools of molasses, and threw live pigs and coops of chickens into the river, and with one voiceless rush left the broad levee a smoking, crackling desert, when some shells exploded on a burning gunboat, and presently were back again like a flock of evil birds.
It began to rain, but Richling sought no shelter. The men he was in search of were not to be found. But the victorious ships, with bare black arms stretched wide, boarding nettings up, and the dark muzzles of their guns bristling from their sides, came, silently as a nightmare, slowly around the bend at Slaughterhouse Point and moved up the middle of the harbor. At the French market he found himself, without forewarning, witness of a sudden skirmish between some Gascon and Sicilian market-men, who had waved a welcome to the fleet, and some Texan soldiers who resented the treason. The report of a musket rang out, a second and third reëchoed it, a pistol cracked, and another, and another; there was a rush for cover; another shot, and another, resounded in the market-house, and presently in the street beyond. Then, in a moment, all was silence and emptiness, into which there ventured but a single stooping, peeping Sicilian, glancing this way and that, with his finger on trigger, eager to kill, gliding from cover to cover, and presently gone again from view, leaving no human life visible nearer than the swarming mob that Richling, by mounting a pile of ship’s ballast, could see still on the steam-boat landing, pillaging in the drenching rain, and the long fleet casting anchor before the town in line of battle.
Late that afternoon Richling, still wet to the skin, amid pushing and yelling and the piping calls of distracted women and children, and scuffling and cramming in, got Kate Ristofalo, trunks, baskets, and babes, safely off on the cars. And when, one week from that day, the sound of drums, that had been hushed for a while, fell upon his ear again,—no longer the jaunty rataplan of Dixie’s drums, but the heavy, monotonous roar of the conqueror’s at the head of his dark-blue columns,—Richling could not leave his bed.
Dr. Sevier sat by him and bore the sound in silence. As it died away and ceased, Richling said:—
“May I write to Mary?”
Then the Doctor had a hard task.
“I wrote for her yesterday,” he said. “But, Richling, I—don’t think she’ll get the letter.”
“Do you think she has already started?” asked the sick man, with glad eagerness.