The boat crept southward into the cloud, where only Gaines was dimly visible, flashing and howling landward. Irby was in that flashing. Steve was back yonder in Powell with Kincaid's Battery. Through Steve, present at the reading of a will made at Vicksburg the day after Hilary's capture there, Irby had just notified Anna, for Hilary, that their uncle had left everything to him, Adolphe. She hoped it was true, but for once in her life had doubts without discomfort. How idly the mind can drift in fateful moments. The bell tapped for six. As it did so the two watchers descried through a rift in the smoke the Tennessee signaling her grim litter, and the four crawling forward to meet the ships. Again the smoke closed in, but the small boat stole through it and hovered at its edge while the minutes passed and the foe came on. How plain to be seen was each pair, how familiar some of those taller shapes! "The _Brooklyn_, 'Randa, right in front. And there again is the admiral's flag, on the _Hartford_. And there, with her topmasts down, is the _Richmond_--oh, 'Ran', it's the same bad dream once more!" Not quite. There were ships new to them, great and less, whose savage names, told by the man near the window, chilled the blood with reminder of old wars and massacres: the _Winnebago, Chickasaw, Octorora, Ossipee, Metacomet, Séminale_. "Look!" said the man, pointing, "the _Tecumseh_--" LXIX SOUTHERN CROSS AND NORTHERN STAR A red streak and white sun-lit puff sprang from the leading monitor's turret, and the jarring boom of a vast gun came over the water, wholly unlike the ringing peals of Gaines's lighter armament. Now its opposite cranny puffed and thundered. The man smiled an instant. "Spitting on her hands," he said, but then murmured to himself, "Lord! look at that wind!" "Is it bad?" asked Anna. "It'll blow every bit of smoke into our men's eyes," he sighed. The two white puffs melted into the perfect blue of sea and sky unanswered. Fort Gaines and its besiegers even ceased to fire. Their fate was not in their own guns. More and more weird waxed the grisly dumbness of five-sided Morgan and the spectral silence of the oncoming league-long fleet. The light wind freshened. By the bell's six taps it was seven o'clock. The boat drifting in on the tide made Fort Gaines seem to move seaward. Miranda looked back to Fort Powell and then out to sea again. "The worst," said Anna, reading her thought, "will be down there with the _Tennessee_." Miranda answered low: "Suppose, Nan, that, after all, he should--?" Anna turned sharply: "Get here? I expect it! Oh, you may gaze! I don't forget how often I've flouted Con's intuitions. But I've got one now, a big one!" "That he's coming?" "Been coming these two days--pure presentiment!" "Nan, whether he is or not, if you'll tell us what Colonel Greenleaf wrote you I'll tell you--"