Kincaids Battery | Page 7

walked beside his cousin toward the command, his horse close at his
back. The group, by pairs, chose view points. Only Miss Valcour
stayed in the carriage with the General, bent on effecting a change in
his mind. In Mobile Flora had been easily first in any social set to
which she condescended. In New Orleans, brought into the Callenders'
circles by her cousin Mandeville, she had found herself quietly ranked
second to Anna, and Anna now yet more pointedly outshining her
through the brazen splendor of this patriotic gift of guns. For this
reason and others yet to appear she had planned a strategy and begun a
campaign, one of whose earliest manoeuvres must be to get Irby, not
Kincaid, made their uncle's adjutant-general, and therefore to persuade
the uncle that to give Kincaid the battery would endear him to Anna
and so crown with victory the old man's perfectly obvious plan.
Greenleaf left his horse tied and walked apart with Anna. This, he
murmured, was the last time they would be together for years.
"Yes," she replied with a disheartening composure, although from
under the parasol with which he shaded her she met his eyes so kindly
that his heart beat quicker. But before he could speak on she looked
away to his fretting horse and then across to the battery, where a
growing laugh was running through the whole undisciplined command.
"What is it about?" she playfully inquired, but then saw. In response to
the neigh of Greenleaf's steed Hilary's had paused an instant and turned
his head, but now followed on again, while the laughter ended in the
clapping of a hundred hands; for Kincaid's horse had the bridle free on
his neck and was following his master as a dog follows. Irby scowled,

the General set his jaws, and Hilary took his horse's bridle and led him
on.
"That's what I want to do every time I look at him!" called Charlie to
his sister.
"Then look the other way!" carolled back the slender beauty. To whom
Anna smiled across in her belated way, and wondered if the impulse to
follow Hilary Kincaid ever came to women.
But now out yonder the two cousins were in the saddle, Irby's sabre
was out, and soon the manoeuvres were fully under way. Flora, at the
General's side, missed nothing of them, yet her nimble eye kept her
well aware that across here in this open seclusion the desperate
Greenleaf's words to Anna were rarely explanatory of the drill.
"And now," proclaimed Mandeville, "you'll see them form into line
fazed to the rear!" And Flora, seeing and applauding, saw also Anna
turn to her suitor a glance, half pity for him, half pleading for his pity.
"I say unless--" Greenleaf persisted--
"There is no 'unless.' There can't ever be any."
"But may I not at least say--?"
"I'd so much rather you would not," she begged.
"At present, you mean?"
"Or in the future," said Anna, and, having done perfectly thus far,
spoiled all by declaring she would "never marry!" Her gaze rested far
across the field on the quietly clad figure of Kincaid riding to and fro
and pointing hither and yon to his gold-laced cousin. Off here on the
left she heard Mandeville announcing:
"Now they'll form batt'rie to the front by throwing caisson' to the
rear--look--look!... Ah, ha! was not that a prettie?"

Pretty it was declared to be on all sides. Flora called it "a beautiful."
Part of her charm was a Creole accent much too dainty for print. Anna
and Greenleaf and the other couples regathered about the carriage, and
Miss Valcour from her high seat smiled her enthusiasm down among
them, exalting theirs. And now as a new movement of the battery
followed, and now another, her glow heightened, and she called
musically to Constance, Mrs. Callender and Anna, by turns, to behold
and admire. For one telling moment she was, and felt herself, the focus
of her group, the centre of its living picture. Out afield yet another
manoeuvre was on, and while Anna and her suitor stood close below
her helplessly becalmed each by each, Flora rose to her feet and caught
a great breath of delight. Her gaze was on the glittering mass of men,
horses, and brazen guns that came thundering across the plain in double
column--Irby at its head, Kincaid alone on the flank--and sweeping
right and left deployed into battery to the front with cannoneers
springing to their posts for action.
"Pretties' of all!" she cried, and stood, a gentle air stirring her light
draperies, until the boys at the empty guns were red-browed and short
of breath in their fierce pretence of loading and firing. Suddenly the
guns were limbered up and went bounding over the field,