"Send one of the men for the post surgeon at once, then come back here,"
said the captain, and Pierce hastened to the gate. As he returned, the
west shutters were being thrown open. There was light when he re-entered
the room, and this was what he saw. On the China matting, running from
underneath the sofa, fed by heavy drops from above, a dark wet stain. On
the lounge, stretched at full length, a stiffening human shape, a
yellow-white, parchment-like face above the black clothing, a bluish,
half-opened mouth whose yellow teeth showed savagely, a fallen chin and
jaw, covered with the gray stubble of unshaved beard, and two staring,
sightless, ghastly eyes fixed and upturned as though in agonized appeal.
Stone-dead,--murdered, doubtless,--all that was left of the little
Frenchman Lascelles.

CHAPTER V.

All that day the storm raged in fury; the levee road was blocked in
places by the boughs torn from overhanging trees, and here, there, and
everywhere turned into a quagmire by the torrents that could find no
adequate egress to the northward swamps. For over a mile above the
barracks it looked like one vast canal, and by nine o'clock it was
utterly impassable. No cars were running on the dilapidated road to the
"half-way house," whatever they might be doing beyond. There was only
one means of communication between the garrison and the town, and that,
on horseback along the crest of the levee, and people in the
second-story windows of the store- and dwelling-houses along the
other side of the way, driven aloft by the drenched condition of the
ground floor, were surprised to see the number of times some Yankee
soldier or other made the dismal trip. Cram, with a party of four, was
perhaps the first. Before the dripping sentries of the old guard were
relieved at nine o'clock every man and woman at the barracks was aware
that foul murder had been done during the night, and that old Lascelles,
slain by some unknown hand, slashed and hacked in a dozen places,
according to the stories afloat, lay in his gloomy old library up the
levee road, with a flood already a foot deep wiping out from the grounds
about the house all traces of his assailants. Dr. Denslow, in examining
the body, found just one deep, downward stab, entering above the upper
rib and doubtless reaching the heart,--a stab made by a long, straight,
sharp, two-edged blade. He had been dead evidently some hours when
discovered by Cram, who had now gone to t