And the wrangle began anew with revived spirit. It was well, perhaps, that the refugees had a subject of discussion so charged with immediate and general interest, since they had no resource but to roam the old place until breakfast should be announced. After this meal they would resume their fitful wanderings till a boat should be sighted. They had turned out of their comfortable quarters when Captain Treherne had been brought to the restricted inhabited space of the old building, relinquishing the shake-down and the fire to him and his special ministrants. Now and again a speculation concerning breakfast agitated the group of men, and one venturesome spirit made a journey down the quaking old rear verandah to the kitchen, stepping over gaps where the flooring had been torn up for fuel and walking the rotting sills when the hiatus was too wide to be leaped. His errand to expedite breakfast was, apparently, without result. “Yes, sah,” said the waiter-cook, into whose gloomy soul morning had yet cast no illuminating ray. “I gwine ter dish up when de breakfast is cooked,--nuver knowed you wanted it raw. Cap’n nuver treated me right,--no range, no cook-fixin’s,--nuthin’--an’ breakfast expected to be smokin’ on de table ’fore de fog is off de river. Naw, Sah,--ef you kin cook it any quicker, why cook it yourself, Sah. I ain’t got no dijections to your cookin’ it.” Upon his return from his tour of discovery, being earnestly interrogated as to the prospects by his fellow-refugees, the gentleman gave this sage advice: “If you don’t want to have to knock an impudent nigger down you will stay here and eat breakfast when he has a mind to serve it.” The fog clung to the face of the river. It stood blank and white at the great portal of the house, and sifted through the shattered windows, and silence dominated it. One felt infinitely removed from all the affairs of life. The world was not even a neighbor. Time seemed annihilated. It could not be that yesterday, at this hour, they stood on the stanch deck of the _Cherokee Rose_, or that only the week before they trod the streets of Memphis, or Vicksburg, or Helena. That white pall seemed to shut off all the possibilities of life, and there was a sort of shock, as of a revulsion of nature, when there came through this flocculent density the sound of a horse’s hoofs on the graveled drive, and then, on the portico, the ponderous measured tread of a man of weight and bulk. He was in the hall before the group was aware of his entrance. Hale and strong, although of advanced years, well dressed in a sober fashion, grave, circumspect, reticent of manner, he had turned toward the second door before a word of his intent could be asked. A gesture had answered his inquiry for Captain Hugh Treherne. He entered, without knocking, and the door closed on silence. The group in the hall stared at one another, aware, in some subtle way, of a crisis which the simple facts did not explain.