Tormentingly in Hilary's way was this Lottery and Bazaar. Even from Anna, sometimes especially from Anna, he could not understand why certain things must not be told or certain things could not be done until this Bazaar--etc. Why, at any hour he might be recalled! Yes, Anna saw that--through very moist eyes. True, also, she admitted, Beauregard and Johnston _might_ fail to hold off Buell and Grant; and true, as well, New Orleans _could_ fall, and might be sacked. It was while confessing this that with eyes down and bosom heaving she accepted the old Italian knife. Certainly unless the pooh-poohing Mandeville was wrong, who declared the forts down the river impregnable and Beauregard, on the Tennessee, invincible, flight (into the Confederacy) was safest--but--the Bazaar first, flight afterward. "We women," she said, rising close before him with both hands in his, "must stand by _our_ guns. We've no more right"--it was difficult to talk while he kissed her fingers and pressed her palms to his gray breast--"no more right--to be cowards--than you men." Her touch brought back his lighter mood and he told the happy thought--project--which had come to him while they talked with the jeweller. He could himself "do the job," he said, "roughly but well enough." Anna smiled at the fanciful scheme. Yet--yes, its oddity was in its favor. So many such devices were succeeding, some of them to the vast advantage of the Southern cause. When Flora the next evening stole a passing glance at the ugly trinket in its place she was pleased to note how well it retained its soilure of clay. For she had that day used it to free the panel, behind which she had found a small recess so fitted to her want that she had only to replace panel and tool and await some chance in the closing hours of the show. Pleased she was, too, to observe that the old jewels lay in a careless heap. Now to conceal all interest and to divert all eyes, even grandmama's! Thus, however, night after night an odd fact eluded her: That Anna and her hero, always singly, and themselves careful to lure others away, glimpsed that disordered look of the gems and unmolested air of the knife with a content as purposeful as her own. Which fact meant, when came the final evening, that at last every sham jewel in the knife's sheath had exchanged places with a real one from the loose heap, while, nestling between two layers of the sheath's material, reposed, payable to bearer, a check on London for thousands of pounds sterling. Very proud was Anna of her lover's tremendous versatility and craftsmanship. XXXIX TIGHT PINCH From Camp Villeré, close below small Camp Callender, one more last regiment--Creoles--was to have gone that afternoon to the Jackson Railroad Station and take train to join their Creole Beauregard for the defence of their own New Orleans.