Next day, as Carter had promised, he was able to attend to business. His first act was to issue an order assigning Captain Colburne to his staff as "Acting Assistant Adjutant-General, to be obeyed and respected accordingly." When the young officer reported for duty he found the Colonel sober, but stern and gloomy with the woful struggle against his maniacal appetite, and shaky in body with the result of the bygone debauch.
"Captain," said he, "I wish you would do me the favor to join my mess. I want a temperance man. No more whiskey for one while!—By the way, I owe you so much I never can repay you for saving my wife from those savages. If admiration is any reward, you have it. My wife and her father both overflow with your praises."
Colburne bowed and replied that he had done no more than his duty as an officer and a gentleman.
"I am glad it was you who did it," replied the Colonel. "I don't know any other person to whom I would so willingly be under such an obligation."
It was certainly rather handsome in Carter that he should cheerfully permit his wife to feel admiration and gratitude towards so handsome a young man as Colburne.
"That infernal poltroon of a Gazaway!" he broke out presently. "I ought to have cashiered him long ago. I'll have him court-martialed and shot. By the way, he was perfectly well when you saw him, wasn't he?"
"I should think so. He looked like a champion of the heavy weights. The mere reflection of his biceps was enough to break a looking-glass."
"I thought he had run away from the service altogether. He came up to the regiment once during the siege. The officers kicked him out, and he disappeared. Got in at some hospital, it seems—By (this and that) three quarters of the hospitals are a disgrace to the service. They are asylums for shirks and cowards. I wish you would make it your first business to inform yourself of all Gazaway's sneakings—misbehavior in presence of the enemy, you understand—violation of the fifty-second article of war—and draw up charges against him. I want charges that will shoot him."
Here I may as well anticipate the history of the Major. When the charges against him were forwarded, he got wind of them, and, making a personal appeal to high authority, pleaded hard for leave to resign on a surgeon's certificate of physical disability. The request was granted for some mysterious reason, probably of political origin; and this vulgar poltroon left the army, and the department with no official stigma on his character. On reaching Barataria he appealed to his faithful old herd of followers and assailed Colonel Carter and Captain Colburne as a couple of aristocrats who would not let a working man hold a commission.
Two days subsequent to Colburne's arrival at Port Hudson the brigade sailed to Fort Winthrop and from thence followed the trail of the retreating Texans as far as Thibodeaux, where Carter established his head-quarters. A week later, when the rebels were all across the Atchafalaya and quiet once more prevailed in the Lafourche Interieur, he sent to New Orleans for his wife, and established her in a pretty cottage, with orange trees and a garden, in the outskirts of the little French American city. The Doctor's plantation house had been burned, his agricultural implements destroyed, and his cattle eaten or driven away by the rebels, who put a devout zeal into the task of laying waste every spot which had been desecrated by the labor of manumitted bondsmen. His grand experiment of reorganizing southern industry being thus knocked on the head, he had applied for and obtained his old position in the hospital. Lillie wept at parting from him, but nevertheless flew to live with her husband.