the highway, just
reaching the gardens, whose dashing coach and span, but the Callenders'?

Dashing was the look of it, not its speed. Sedately it came. Behind it
followed a team of four giant mules, a joy to any quartermaster's
vision, drawing a plantation wagon filled with luggage. On the old
coachman's box sat beside him a slave maid, and in the carriage the
three Callenders and Charlie. Anna and Miranda were on the rear seat and
for the wounded boy's better ease his six-shooter lay in Anna's lap. A
brave animation in the ladies was only the more prettily set off by a
pinkness of earlier dejection about their eyes. Abreast the gate they
halted to ask an armed sentry whether the open way up the river coast
was through the gardens or--

He said there was no longer any open way without a pass from General
Lovell, and when they affably commended the precaution and showed a pass
he handed it to an officer, a heated, bustling, road-soiled young
Creole, who had ridden up at the head of a mounted detail. This youth,
as he read it, shrugged. "Under those present condition'," he said, with
a wide gesture toward the remote miles of blazing harbor, "he could not
honor a pazz two weeks ole. They would 'ave to rit-urn and get it
renew'."

"Oh! how? How hope to do so in all yonder chaos? And how! oh, how!
could an army--in full retreat--leaving women and wounded soldiers to
the mercy of a ravening foe--compel them to remain in the city it was
itself evacuating?" A sweet and melodious dignity was in all the
questions, but eyes shone, brows arched, lips hung apart and
bonnet-feathers and hat-feathers, capes and flounces, seemed to ruffle
wider, with consternation and hurt esteem.

The officer could not explain a single how. He could do no more than
stubbornly regret that the questioners must even return by train, the
dread exigencies of the hour compelling him to impress these horses for
one of his guns and those mules for his battery-wagon.

Anna's three companions would have sprung to their feet but in some way
her extended hand stayed them. A year earlier Charlie would have made
sad mistakes here, but now he knew the private soldier's helplessness
before the gold bars of commission, and his rage was white and dumb, as,
with bursting eyes, he watched the officer pencil a blank.

"Don't write that, sir," said a clear voice, and the writer, glancing
up, saw Anna standing among the seated three. Her face was drawn with
distres