“This ae night, this ae night, Every night and all. Fire and sleet and candlelight And Christ receive thy soul—” The officer working with him uttered a low exclamation. “Look!” Stafford looked, then turned his head. “Be ready, all of you! We’re nearly through.” The earth fell, the rift widened. Down into the breathless tunnel, like wine to the exhausted, came a gust of night air. The long queue of waiting men quivered. The hole in the roof widened.... The workers were now working very cautiously, very quietly. Even in the dead of the night, even well beyond the stockade, even, as they hoped, in the bottom of the gully running down to the river, there might be wakeful ears. The workers made the least possible noise, the hundred and odd waiting prisoners made none at all. Crouched in silence they breathed the night air and the sweat dried upon them.... The hole in the roof became large enough to let a man through. Footholds had already been made along the side of the tunnel. The workers laid down their picks, mounted, and tried their weight upon the edges of the opening. The earth held. “Ready!” breathed Stafford. “McCarthy, you go first.” McCarthy drew himself up and out of the tunnel. “Now, Lamar!” Lamar followed. The queue moved a step forward. The third man had his hands on the edge of the hole. McCarthy’s form appeared above, blocking the starlight, McCarthy’s face down bent, waxen as the almost burned-out taper which threw against it a little quivering light. McCarthy’s whisper came down. “O my God, my God! We turned and dug obliquely.... We’re still inside the stockade!” There sounded the discharge of a sentry’s piece, followed by a hallooing and the noise of running feet. CHAPTER XII THE SIEGE Eight gunboats held the river in front of, above, and below the doomed town. Under the leafy Louisiana shore the blue placed seven mortars. These kept up a steady fire upon the city and the river defences. At intervals the gunboats engaged the lower batteries. There was an abandoned line of works which was seized upon by a cloud of blue sharpshooters. These began to pick off men at the grey guns, and traverses had to be built against them. The grey had in the river batteries thirty-one siege guns, and a few pieces of light artillery. Even of these they had eventually to spare guns for the land defences.