dle, and fled after his men.

XLII

"VICTORY! I HEARD IT AS PL'--"

The last few days of March and first three or four of April, since the
battery boys and the three captains had gone, were as full of frightened
and angry questions as the air is of bees around a shaken hive.

So Anna had foreboded, yet it was not so for the causes she had in mind;
not one fierce hum asked another where the bazaar's money was. That
earlier bazaar, in the St. Louis Hotel, had taken six weeks to report
its results, and now, with everybody distracted by a swarm and buzz of
far larger, livelier, hotter queries, the bazaar's sponsors might report
or not, as they chose. Meanwhile, was the city really in dire and
shameful jeopardy, or was it as safe as the giddiest boasted? Looking
farther away, over across Georgia to Fort Pulaski, so tremendously
walled and armed, was the "invader" merely wasting lives, trying to take
it? On North Carolina's coast, where our priceless blockade-runners
plied, had Newbern, as so stubbornly rumored, and had Beaufort, already
fallen, or had they really not? Had the _Virginia_ not sunk the
_Monitor_ and scattered the Northern fleets? Was it _not_ by France,
after all (asked the Creoles), but only by Paraguay that the Confederacy
had been "reco'nize'"? Was there _no_ truth in the joyous report that
McClellan had vanished from Yorktown peninsula? _Was_ the loss of
Cumberland Gap a trivial matter, and did it in fact not cut in two our
great strategic front? Up yonder at Corinth, our "new and far better"
base, was Sidney Johnston an "imbecile," a "coward," a "traitor"? or
was he not rather an unparagoned strategist who, having at last "lured
the presumptuous foe" into his toils, was now, with Beauregard,
notwithstanding Beauregard's protracted illness, about to make the "one
fell swoop" of our complete deliverance? And after the swoop and its joy
and its glory, when Johnnie should come marching home, whose Johnnies,
and how many, would never return? As to your past-and-gone bazaar, law,
honey--!

So, as to that item, in all the wild-eyed city shaking with its ague of
anxieties only Anna was troubled when day after day no detective came
back with the old mud-caked dagger and now both were away on some quite
alien matter, no one could say where. She alone was troubled, for she
alone knew it was the bazaar's proceeds which had disappeared. Of what
avail to tell even Miranda, Connie, or Flora if they must not