“Ah! my pious friends,—still at it, I see!” exclaimed Robson, coming in upon them. “You remind me of a French hymn I learnt in my youth: ‘Tous les méchants sont buveurs d’eau; C’est bien prouvé par le déluge!’ Which, for Sanderson’s benefit, I will translate: ‘Who are the wicked? Why, water-drinkers! The deluge proves it to all right thinkers.’” Leaving the trio over their cups, let us follow the enraged Ratcliff in his adventures subsequent to his letter to Semmes. The Rebel was a boat armed with a one-hundred-pound rifled gun, and used for occasional reconnoitring expeditions down the river. Ratcliff had no difficulty in inducing the captain to put her on the chase; but an hour was spent hunting up the engineer and getting ready. At last the Rebel was started in pursuit. The rain had ceased, and the moon, bursting occasionally from dark drifting clouds, shed a fitful light. Ratcliff paced the deck, smoking cigars, and nursing his rage. It was nearly sunrise before they reached Forts Jackson and St. Philip, thirty-three miles above the Balize. Nothing could yet be seen of the steam-tug; but there was a telltale pillar of smoke in the distance. “We shall have her!” said Ratcliff, exultingly. Following in the trail of the Rebel were numerous sea-gulls whom the storm had driven up the river. The boat now entered that long canal-like section where the great river flows between narrow banks, which, including the swamps behind them, are each not more than two or three hundred yards wide, running out into the Gulf of Mexico. Here and there among the dead reeds and scattered willows a tall white crane might be seen feeding. Over these narrow fringes of swampy land you could see the dark-green waters of the Gulf just beginning to be incarnadined by the rising sun. With the saltwater so near on either side that you could shoot an arrow into it, you saw the river holding its way through the same deep, unbroken channel, keeping unmixed its powerful body of fresh water, except when hurricanes sweep the briny spray over these long ribbons of land into the Mississippi. Vance had abandoned his original intention of trying the Pass à l’Outre. Having learned from a pilot that the Brooklyn, carrying the Stars and Stripes, was cruising off the Southwest Pass, he resolved to steer in that direction. But when within five miles of the head of the Passes, one of those capricious fogs, not uncommon on the river, came down, shrouding the banks on either side. The Artful Dodger crept along at an abated speed through the sticky vapor. Soon the throb of a steamer close in the rear could be distinctly heard. The Artful had but one gun, and that was a 5-inch rifled one; but it could be run out over her after bulwarks.