Under the combined influence of weakness, whiskey and chloroform, Colburne fell asleep after the operation. About sundown he awoke, his throat so parched that he could hardly speak, his skin fiery with fever, and his whole body sore. Nevertheless he joined a procession of slightly wounded men, and marched a mile to a general hospital which had been set up in and around a planter's house in rear of the forest. The proprietor and his son were in the garrison of Port Hudson. But the wife and two grown-up daughters were there, full of scorn and hatred; so unwomanly, so unimaginably savage in conversation and soul that no novelist would dare to invent such characters; nothing but real life could justify him in painting them. They seemed to be actually intoxicated with the malignant strength of a malice, passionate enough to dethrone the reason of any being not aboriginally brutal. They laughed like demons to see the wounds and hear the groans of the sufferers. They jeered them because the assault had failed. The Yankees never could take Port Hudson; they were the meanest, the most dastardly people on earth. Joe Johnson would soon kill the rest of them, and have Banks a prisoner, and shut him up in a cage. "I hope to see you all dead," laughed one of these female hyenas. "I will dance with joy on your graves. My brother makes beautiful rings out of Yankee bones." No harm was done to them, nor any stress of silence laid upon them. When their own food gave out they were fed from the public stores; and at the end of the siege they were left unmolested, to gloat in their jackal fashion over patriot graves.