Kincaids Battery | Page 2

seeking the Gulf of Mexico, turns from east to south
before it sweeps northward and southeast again to give to the Creole
capital its graceful surname of the "Crescent City." Mile-wide, brimful,
head-on and boiling and writhing twenty fathoms deep, you could

easily have seen, that afternoon, why its turfed levee had to be eighteen
feet high and broad in proportion. So swollen was the flood that from
any deck of a steamboat touching there one might have looked down
upon the whole fair still suburb.
Widely it hovered in its nest of rose gardens, orange groves, avenues of
water-oaks, and towering moss-draped pecans. A few hundred yards
from the levee a slender railway, coming from the city, with a highway
on either side, led into its station-house; but mainly the eye would have
dwelt on that which filled the interval between the nearer high road and
the levee--the "Carrollton Gardens."
At a corner of these grounds closest to the railway station stood a quiet
hotel from whose eastern veranda it was but a step to the centre of a
sunny shell-paved court where two fountains danced and tinkled to
each other. Along its farther bound ran a vine-clad fence where a row
of small tables dumbly invited the flushed visitor to be inwardly cooled.
By a narrow gate in this fence, near its townward end, a shelled walk
lured on into a musky air of verdurous alleys that led and misled,
crossed, doubled, and mazed among flowering shrubs from bower to
bower. Out of sight in there the loiterer came at startling moments face
to face with banks of splendid bloom in ravishing negligee--Diana
disrobed, as it were, while that untiring sensation-hunter, the
mocking-bird, leaped and sang and clapped his wings in a riot of
scandalous mirth.
In the ground-floor dining-room of that unanimated hotel sat an old
gentleman named Brodnax, once of the regular army, a retired veteran
of the Mexican war, and very consciously possessed of large means. He
sat quite alone, in fine dress thirty years out of fashion, finishing a late
lunch and reading a newspaper; a trim, hale man not to be called old in
his own hearing. He had read everything intended for news or
entertainment and was now wandering in the desert of the advertising
columns, with his mind nine miles away, at the other end of New
Orleans.
Although not that person whom numerous men of his acquaintance had
begun affectionately to handicap with the perilous nickname of "the

ladies' man," he was thinking of no less than five ladies; two of one
name and three of another. Flora Valcour and her French grandmother
(as well as her brother of nineteen, already agog to be off in the war)
had but lately come to New Orleans, from Mobile. On a hilly border of
that smaller Creole city stood the home they had left, too isolated, with
war threatening, for women to occupy alone. Mrs. Callender was the
young widow of this old bachelor's life-long friend, the noted judge of
that name, then some two years deceased. Constance and Anna were
her step-daughters, the latter (if you would believe him) a counterpart
of her long-lost, beautiful mother, whose rejection of the soldier's suit,
when he was a mere lieutenant, was the well-known cause of his
singleness. These Callender ladies, prompted by him and with a sweet
modesty of quietness, had just armed a new field battery with its six
splendid brass guns, and it was around these three Callenders that his
ponderings now hung; especially around Anna and in reference to his
much overprized property and two nephews: Adolphe Irby, for whom
he had obtained the command of this battery, which he was to see him
drill this afternoon, and Hilary Kincaid, who had himself cast the guns
and who was to help the senior cousin conduct these evolutions.
The lone reader's glance loitered down a long row of slim paragraphs,
each beginning with the same wee picture of a steamboat whether it
proclaimed the Grand Duke or the Louis d'Or, the Ingomar bound for
the "Lower Coast," or the Natchez for "Vicksburg and the Bends."
Shifting the page, he read of the Swiss Bell-Ringers as back again
"after a six years' absence," and at the next item really knew what he
read. It was of John Owens' appearance, every night, as Caleb Plummer
in "Dot," "performance to begin at seven o'clock." Was it there
Adolphe would this evening take his party, of which the dazzling Flora
would be one and Anna, he hoped, another? He had proposed this party
to Adolphe, agreeing to bear its whole cost if the nephew would
manage to include in it Anna and Hilary. And Irby had duly reported
complete success and drawn on him, but the old