It looks strange written and printed, but she did not see how to hold off when he made it so tenderly manful a matter of course after his frank hand-shake with Miranda, and when there seemed so little time for words.
An ambulance drawn by the Callenders' horses had brought him and two or three others down the West Side. A sail-boat had conveyed them from the nearest beach. Here it was, now, in tow beside the steamboat as she gathered headway toward Fort Powell. He was not so weak or broken but he could point rapidly about with his crutches, the old light of command in his eyes, while with recognized authority he spoke to the boat's master and these companions.
He said things freely. There was not much down here to be secret about. Mobile had not fallen. She would yet be fought for on land, furiously. But the day was lost; as, incidentally, might be, at any moment, if not shrewdly handled, this lonesome little boat.
Her captain moved to the pilot-house. Miranda and the junior officers left Hilary with Anna. "Did you say 'the day,'" she softly asked, "or 'the bay'?"
"Both," he murmured, and with his two crutches in one hand directed her eyes: to the fleet anchored midway off Morgan, Gaines, and Powell; to the half-dozen gunboats on Mississippi Sound; to others still out in the Gulf, behind Morgan, off Mobile Point; to the blue land force entrenched behind Gaines, and to the dunes east of Morgan, where similar besiegers would undoubtedly soon be landed.
"Yes ... Yes," she said to his few explanations. It was all so sadly clear.
"A grand fort yet," he musingly called Morgan, "but it ought to be left and blown to fare-you-well to-night before it's surroun--I wish my cousin were there instead of in Gaines. 'Dolphe fights well, but he knows when not to fight and that we've come, now, to where every man we've got, and every gun, counts bigger than to knock out any two of the enemy's. You know Fred's over yonder, don't you? and that Kincaid's Battery, without their field-pieces, are just here in Powell behind her heavy guns?... Yes, Victorine said you did; I saw her this morning, with Constance." He paused, and then spoke lower:
"Beloved?"
She smiled up to him.
"Our love's not through all the fire, yet," he said, but her smile only showed more glow.