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Regarding his life as charmed, the blacks followed him in crowds, while he descanted upon the text: “Then two shall be in the field. One shall be taken and the other left.”

A great revival was in progress.

But this afternoon the levee at Bijou had been the scene of a new panic.

Rumor said that the blockade chain had been cut. Farragut’s war monsters might any moment come snorting up the river. Nor was this all. The only local defence here was a volunteer artillery company of “Exempts.” Old “Captain Doc,” their leader, also local druggist and postmaster (doctor and minister only in emergency), was a unique and picturesque figure. Full of bombast as of ultimate kindness of feeling, he was equally happy in all of his four offices.

The “Rev. Capt. Doc, M.D.,” as he was wont, on occasion, to call himself–why drag in a personal name among titles in themselves sufficiently distinguishing?–was by common consent the leading man with a certain under-population along the coast. And when, three months before, he had harangued them as to the patriot’s duty of home defence, there was not a worthy incapable present but enthusiastically enlisted.

The tension of the times forbade perception of the ludicrous. For three months the “Riffraffs”–so they proudly called themselves–rheumatic, deaf, palsied, halt, lame, and one or two nearly blind, had represented “the cause,” “the standing army,” “le grand militaire,” to the inflammable imaginations of this handful of simple rural people of the lower coast.

Of the nine “odds and ends of old cannon” which Captain Doc had been able to collect, it was said that but one would carry a ball. Certainly, of the remaining seven, one was of wood, an ancient gunsmith’s sign, and another a gilded papier-mache affair of a former Mystick Krewe.

Still, these answered for drill purposes, and would be replaced by genuine guns when possible. They were quite as good for everything excepting a battle, and in that case, of course, it would be a simple thing “to seize the enemy’s guns” and use them.

When the Riffraffs had paraded up and down the river road no one had smiled, and if anybody realized that their captain wore the gorgeous pompon of a drum-major, its fitness was not questioned.

It was becoming to him. It corresponded to his lordly strut, and was in keeping with the stentorian tones that shouted “Halt!” or “Avance!”

Captain Doc appealed to Americans and creoles alike, and the Riffraffs marched quite as often to the stirring measures of “La Marseillaise” as to “The Bonny Blue Flag.”

Ever since the first guns at the forts, the good captain had been disporting himself in full feather. He was “ready for the enemy.”

His was a pleasing figure, and even inspiring as a picturesque embodiment of patriotic zeal; but when this afternoon the Riffraffs had planted their artillery along the levee front, while the little captain rallied them to “prepare to die by their guns,” it was a different matter.

The company, loyal to a man, had responded with a shout, the blacksmith, to whose deaf ears his anvil had been silent for twenty years, throwing up his hat with the rest, while the epileptic who manned the papier-mache gun was observed to scream the loudest.

Suddenly a woman, catching the peril of the situation, shrieked:

“They’re going to fire on the gunboats! We’ll all be killed.”

Another caught the cry, and another. A mad panic ensued; women with babies in their arms gathered about Captain Doc, entreating him, with tears and cries, to desist.

But for once the tender old man, whose old boast had been that one tear from a woman’s eyes “tore his heart open,” was deaf to all entreaty.

The Riffraffs represented an injured faction. They had not been asked to enlist with the “Coast Defenders”–since gone into active service–and they seemed intoxicated by the present opportunity to “show the stuff they were made of.”

At nearly nightfall the women, despairing and wailing, had gone home. Amid all the excitement the little girl Idyl had stood apart, silent. No one had noticed her, nor that, when all the others had gone, she still lingered.