“Was he not,” asked Loring, “was he not engaged to your sister?”
“No.”
“Indeed? I thought some one told me so.... He has a fine nature.”
“In many ways—yes.”
“Well, we may be talking of the dead. No one seems to have heard. It’s like a tomb—prison! North and South, they die like flies.... Damn it all, such is war!”
“Yes, sir.... I beg your pardon, but isn’t there something moving on the river—very far up, beyond that line of purple?”
Loring whipped out his field-glass, looked, and rose from the driftwood. “Gunboats!” A bugle blew from the earth-and-cotton-bale fort, drums began to roll. “Get to your places, men! If Grant thinks I am going to let him get by here, he’s just mistaken, that’s all!”
With three guns and fifteen hundred men and cotton-bale walls and the sunken Star of the West, Loring made good his words—though it was not Grant in front of him, but Grant’s lieutenants. Two ironclads, two rams, seven tinclads crept up that night, anchoring above the sunken Star. Behind them came slowly on the transports with the forty-five hundred infantry. Dawn broke, and the gunboats, feeling their way, found the Star. Vexation and delay! They undertook to blow her up, and while they sank torpedoes the transports nosed along the river bank trying to find firm landing in a bottom country flooded alike by the spring rains and the far-away broken levee. They could not find it, and on board there was restlessness and complaining. The Star of the West was hard to raise. She clung fast, fought stanchly still for the Stars and Bars.... The third day the Chillicothe and DeKalb got by, steamed down to the fort, and began a raking fire. The rams, too, and several of the tinclads came wriggling through the clearance in the channel. There followed a three days’ bombardment of the crazy fort, all hastily heaped earth and cotton bales, rude trenches, rough platforms for the guns, all squat in the marshy land, wreathed with cannon smoke, musket smoke, topped by the red square with the blue and starry cross! Behind the screen of the gunboats the transports sought continuously for some terra firma where the troops might land. They could not find it. All was swamp, overflowing waters, half-submerged trees. Above waved Spanish moss, swung vines spangled with sweet-smelling, satiny yellow bloom.
The smoke from the river, the smoke from Loring’s three guns and fifteen hundred muskets met and blended, and, spreading, roofed out the cerulean, tender sky. Looking up, his men saw Loring, mature, imposing, standing high on the cotton-bale parapet, his empty sleeve pinned to his coat, gesturing with the remaining arm, about him the grey battle breath, above him the flag.
“Give them blizzards, boys! Give them blizzards!” roared Loring.