"I understand, dear—and I'll arrange it for you. I'll hire a schooner to set you across Lake Pontchartrain."
The old Colonel looked on the face of his dead wife and went to bed. He made no complaints. He asked no questions. The book of life was closed. Within a week he died as peacefully as a child.
Ten days later Jennie had passed the Federal lines and was whirling through the Carolinas, her soul aflame with a new deathless courage.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE IRREPARABLE LOSS
Jefferson Davis not only refused to remove Albert Sidney Johnston from his command in answer to the clamor of his critics, he wrote his general letters expressing such unbounded confidence in his genius that he inspired him to begin the most brilliant campaign on which the South had yet entered.
Grant, flushed with victory, had encamped his army along the banks of the Tennessee, then at flood and easily navigable for gunboats and transports. The bulldog fighter of Fort Donelson had allowed his maxim of war to lead him into a situation which the eye of Johnston was quick to see.
Grant's famous motto was: