Miranda was dressing. Out on the small deck voices were quietly audible and the clink of a ratchet told that the boat was weighing anchor. She rang three-bells. The captain's small clock showed half-past five. Now the swiftly dressed pair opened their windows. The rising sun made a golden path across the tranquil bay and lighted up the three forts and the starry battlecross softly stirring over each. Dauphin Island and Mobile Point were moss-green and pearly white. The long, low, velvety pulsations of the bay were blue, lilac, pink, green, bronze. But angry smoke poured from the funnels of the Tennessee and her three dwarf consorts, they four also showing the battle-flag, and some seven miles away, out in the Gulf, just beyond the gleaming eastern point of Sand Island, was one other sign of unrest. "You see they're under way?" asked Anna. Yes, Miranda saw, and sighed with the questioner. For there, once more--low crouched, war-painted and gliding like the red savages so many of them were named for, the tall ones stripped of all their upper spars, but with the pink spot of wrath flickering at every masthead--came the ships of Farragut. The two women could not count them, so straight on were they headed, but a man near the window said there were seven large and seven less, lashed small to large in pairs. Yet other counting they did, for now out of Sand Island Channel, just west of the ships, came a shorter line--one, two, three, four strange barely discernible things, submerged like crocodiles, a hump on each of the first two, two humps on each of the others, crossed the fleet's course and led the van on the sunward side to bring themselves first and nearest to Morgan, its water-battery, and the _Tennessee_. Anna sighed while to Miranda the man overflowed with information. Ah, ah! in Hampton Roads the _Virginia_ had barely coped with one of those horrors, of one hump, two guns; while here came four, whose humps were six and their giant rifles twelve. "Twenty-two guns in our whole flotilla," the man was saying to Miranda, "and they've got nearly two hundred." The anchor was up. Gently the boat's engines held her against the flood-tide. The man had turned to add some word, when from the land side of Gaines a single columbiad roared and a huge shell screamed off into the investing entrenchments. Then some lighter guns, thirty-twos, twenty-fours, cracked and rang, and the foe replied. His shells burst over and in the fort, and a cloud of white and brown smoke rolled eastward, veiling both this scene and the remoter, seaward, silent, but far more momentous one of Fort Morgan, the fleet, and the _Tennessee_.