And all during that we sat, she, Mr. Landry, and I, in their sitting room, for an even queerer three weeks than the other three weeks had been. He made it up with me, coming over after she left the same day as our brawl, to thank me “for the information, which Mignon has just mentioned to me, about Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I hadn’t known it before, but just verified it in the Britannica, and am truly grateful for it.” I said you couldn’t prove it by me, but I did hear it in college, and he repeated that such things to him were important and he counted himself in my debt. Then he asked me to supper, and I resumed taking my meals with them — a good thing, since the hotel ran out of food and otherwise I’d have been out of luck. We didn’t eat well but we ate, dried stuff from the store, prunes and apples and apricots, beans and peas and rice, stocked in barrels and sacks and kegs. He wouldn’t allow me below to help bring anything up, and once when I glimpsed the kegs I suspected they were the reason, and wondered what was in them. Every day he’d go out for a stroll, to pick up such news as he could, and I’d go down to the courthouse, which had been converted into a hospital and stank of wounded men, to pester for my pass. In between, the three of us would talk.
“You’ve no faith in the dam?” he asked me one day.
“Who wants to know?” I said. “A loyal Reb?”
“No, Mr. Cresap,” he assured me, very solemn, “a loyal Union man. And since you bring it up, I may say that things have changed since we had our last discussion. War was not over in Louisiana — for a few days, at least. Now, I’m sorry to say, it is — finally, and for keeps. I said it, didn’t I? That I was the fool, not Taylor, but they’ve drawn Taylor’s teeth and clipped his claws. He’s now a tiger made of paper, with just a token force of no more than five thousand men, banging away with artillery, lighting fires at night, and cutting off forage parties — ever since Kirby Smith, the military genius at Shreveport, took the bulk of his army away, to meet another ‘invasion,’ coming down from the north — if it’s coming, if. So instead of the bird in hand, this Union army in Alexandria, we’re chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, and my allegiance is settled, in heart as well as mouth. Taylor’s doing a wonderful job, but it still remains true there’s not one Reb soldier between this place and Shreveport.”
“What’s that got to do with the dam?”
“Mr. Cresap, suppose it fails?”
“... Well? We lose ten boats, I suppose.”
“You just walk off and leave them?”
“Not I — this army. What else can we do?”
“I may be crazy, but as a loyal Union man I say — and don’t contradict me — no Union army dare pull out of this place and leave ten boats sitting. It would not obey the order; the men would mutiny first! The one thing it can do is march on up to Shreveport — and that’ll cook Taylor, Kirby Smith, the will-o’-the-wisp chasers, and everything Reb in this section! Because what Richmond is to the East, Shreveport is to the West — a base, a source of food, of munitions, of what’s needed to fight. That’s what this army can do, and that’s what it’s going to do, once the river tears that dam apart.”
“What’s the rest of it, sir?”
“... In Springfield, everything’s marking time.”
“Springfield? I thought we were talking of Shreveport.”
“Both are important to us — to you, to me, to Mignon. Nothing can litigate until the Navy gets out of this river and brings its witnesses into court. So if you don’t get there right away, nothing’s lost, is there? You’ll still have time for Shreveport.”
“Yes. Shreveport?”
“The Army takes it, doesn’t it?”
“So you say, Mr. Landry. What then?”
“And the Navy doesn’t take it?”
“Well the Navy’s prevented, sort of.”
He said the Navy was prevented, not only by being stuck, but by being blocked off, from a hulk sunk in the river, the New Falls City, “at the mouth of Loggy Bayou, which is why they turned back in the first place, not from hearing the Army was whipped, as they’ve been giving out. They can’t get out of the mud, and even if they could, they can’t get past the hulk. That means Shreveport’s an Army thing — doesn’t it?”
“All right, what then?”
“These people have confidence in the Army.”
“What people, sir?”
“In Shreveport. No cotton’s going to be burned.”
“... More about cotton, and I’m going to upchuck.”
“For a million dollars you’d upchuck?”
“Did you upchuck with her?”
She’d been sitting with me on the sofa, he facing us in a chair, his eyes roving the river. Now she blazed her eyes at me, then got up and went over to him. In her red-checked gingham dress she kneeled beside him, took his hand in hers, and said: “Go on, lambie — explain us, how do we get the million dollars — oh my, that would be heaven on this earth.”
“So?” I said. “The cotton’s not burned, and—”
“I acquire it. I have friends in Shreveport.”
“You mean, you buy it?”
“I mean I take title, on shares. Once they know it’s the Army, once I assure them of that, those people will trust me, I know. But two things I have to have.”
“All right. What are they?”
“The first is time.”
“I thought we had plenty of time.”
“You have time — I haven’t. I have to know where I stand, so I can get on the spot and write papers — bills of sale, partnership articles with the different people involved, receipts for the Army to sign. With all the thousands of bales waiting for me up there, I can’t do it in an hour; I have to get there ahead of time, I must be there ready and waiting whenever the Army comes.”
“Quite a trudge you’ve picked out for yourself.”
“Trudge? I’ll go by boat.”
“Boat? What boat, Mr. Landry?”
“Reb boats are running again — Doubloon, Grand Duke, all kinds of different ones. When the Union pulled out, traffic resumed as usual. I can be in Shreveport tomorrow — call it day after.”
“... What else must you have?”
“Godpappy, Mr. Cresap.”
“I thought that was it. Meaning me?”
“You’ll have it all to yourself — a monopoly!”
He said that now the other traders had all been sent back to New Orleans I’d be the only one, “and they’ll have to deal with you.” Then he started in again on the mess being made of the dam. “The idea,” he said, “is to set out the trees in pairs — brackets they’re called, I believe — with boards nailed to the trunks. When they’re hauled into the stream, the current’s supposed to help, by pressing down on the boards and holding them tight to the bottom — and it did, so long as the work was close to the bank, where the water’s shallow. But now that they’re moving out where it’s deep, the current’s no help any more. It lifts those trees like Hallowe’en apples and sends them spinning downriver, past the bridge and out. The whole thing’s just pitiful.”