Kincaids Battery | Page 9

any girl, I'd rather have
her without your estate than with it." Suddenly he sobered and glowed:
"I wish you'd leave it to Adolphe! He's a heap-sight better business man
than I. Besides, being older, he feels he has the better right to it. You
know you always counted on leaving it to him."
The General looked black: "You actually decline the gift?"
"No. No, I don't. I want to please you. But of my own free choice I
wouldn't have it. I'm no abolitionist, but I don't want that kind of
property. I don't want the life that has to go with it. I know other sorts
that are so much better. I'm not thinking only of the moral
responsibility--"
"By--! sir, I am!"
"I know you are, and I honor you for it."
"Bah!... Hilary, I--I'm much obliged to you for your company, but--"
"You've had enough," laughed the good-natured young man.
"Good-evening, sir." He took a cross-street.
"Good-evening, my boy." The tone was so kind that Hilary cast a look

back. But the General's eyes were straight before him.
Greenleaf accompanied the Valcours to their door. Charlie, who
disliked him, and whose admiration for his own sister was privately
cynical, had left them to themselves in the train. There, wholly
undetected by the very man who had said some women were too
feminine and she was one, she had played her sex against his with an
energy veiled only by its intellectual nimbleness and its utterly
dispassionate design. Charlie detected achievement in her voice as she
twittered good-by to the departing soldier from their street door.

VI
MESSRS. SMELLEMOUT AND KETCHEM
Night came, all stars. The old St. Charles Theatre filled to overflowing
with the city's best, the hours melted away while Maggie Mitchell
played Fanchon, and now, in the bright gas-light of the narrow
thoroughfare, here were Adolphe and Hilary helping their three ladies
into a carriage. All about them the feasted audience was pouring forth
into the mild February night.
The smallest of the three women was aged. That the other two were
young and beautiful we know already. At eighteen the old lady, the
Bohemian-glass one, had been one of those royalist refugees of the
French Revolution whose butterfly endeavors to colonize in Alabama
and become bees make so pathetic a chapter in history. When one knew
that, he could hardly resent her being heavily enamelled. Irby pressed
into the coach after the three and shut the door, Kincaid uncovered, and
the carriage sped off.
Hilary turned, glanced easily over the heads of the throng, and espied
Greenleaf beckoning with a slender cane. Together they crossed the
way and entered the office of a public stable.
"Our nags again," said Kincaid to one of a seated group, and passed
into a room beyond. Thence he re-issued with his dress modified for

the saddle, and the two friends awaited their mounts under an arch.
"Dost perceive, Frederic," said the facetious Hilary, "yon modestly
arrayed pair of palpable gents hieing hitherward yet pretending not to
descry us? They be detectives. Oh--eh--gentlemen!"
The strangers halted inquiringly and then came forward. The hair of
one was black, of the other gray. Hilary brightened upon them: "I was
just telling my friend who you are. You know me, don't you?" A
challenging glint came into his eye.
But the gray man showed a twinkle to match it: "Why--by
sight--yes--what there is of you."
Hilary smiled again: "I saw you this morning in the office of the
Committee of Public Safety, where I was giving my word that this
friend of mine should leave the city within twenty-four hours." He
introduced him: "Lieutenant Greenleaf, gentleman, United States Army.
Fred, these are Messrs. Smellemout and Ketchem, a leading firm in the
bottling business."
Greenleaf and the firm expressed their pleasure. "We hang out at the
corner of Poet and Good-Children Streets," said the black-haired man,
but made his eyes big to imply that this was romance.
Greenleaf lifted his brows: "Streets named for yourselves, I judge."
"Aye. Poet for each, Good-Children for both."
Kincaid laughed out. "The Lieutenant and I," he said as he moved
toward their approaching horses, "live on Love street exactly half-way
between Piety and Desire." His eyes widened, too. Suddenly he stepped
between Greenleaf and the others: "See here, let's begin to tell the truth!
You know Kincaid's Foundry? It was my father's--"
"And his father's before him," said the gray man.
"And I've come home to go into this war," Hilary went on.

"And just at present," said Gray, "you're casting shot and shell and now
and then a cannon; good for you! You want to give us your
guarantee--?"
"That my friend and I will be together every moment till he leaves
to-morrow morning on the Jackson