utter,--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 reechoed 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, fe