It was hard for the wise one not to look guilty.

“Have you told anybody,” he continued, “in what form you have it, or where?”

“No!” put in the aggrieved Constance, “not even her blood kin!”

“Wise again.  Best for all of you.  Now just hang to the lucre.  It comes too late to be of use here; this brave town will have to stand or fall without it.  But it’s still good for Mobile, and Mobile saved may be New Orleans recovered.”

On a hint from the other women, and urged by their visitor, Anna brought the letter and read him several closely written pages on the strategic meaning of things.  The zest with which he discussed the lines made her newly proud of their source.

“They’re so like his very word o’ mouth,” said he, “they bring him right back here among us.  Yes, and the whole theatre of action with him.  They draw it about us so closely and relate it all to us so vitally that it—­”

“Seems,” broke in the delighted Constance, “as if we saw it all from the top of this house!”

The Doctor’s jaw set.  Who likes phrases stuffed into his mouth?  Yet presently he allowed himself to resume.  It confirmed, he said, Beauregard’s word in his call for volunteers, that there, before Corinth, was the place to defend Louisiana.  Soon he had regained his hueless ardor, and laid out the whole matter on the table for the inspiration of his three confiding auditors.  Here at Chattanooga, so impregnably ours, issued Tennessee river and the Memphis and Charleston railroad from the mountain gateway between our eastern and western seats of war.  Here they swept down into Alabama, passed from the state’s north-east to its north-west corner and parted company.  Here the railway continued westward, here it crossed the Mobile and Ohio railroad at Corinth, here the Mississippi Central at Grand Junction, and pressed on to Memphis, our back-gate key of the Mississippi.

“In war,” said the Doctor, “rivers and railro’—­”

“Are the veins and arteries of—­oh, pardon!” The crime was Anna’s this time.

“Are the lines fought for,” resumed the speaker, “and wherever two or three of them join or cross you may look for a battle.”  His long finger dropped again to the table.  Back here in Alabama the Tennessee turned north to seek the Ohio, and here, just over the Mississippi state line, in Tennessee, some twenty miles north of Corinth, it became navigable for the Ohio’s steamboats—­gunboats—­transports—­at a place called in the letter “Pittsburg Landing.”

Yes, now, between Hilary’s pages and the Doctor’s logic, with Hilary almost as actually present as the physician, the ladies saw why this great Memphis-Chattanooga fighting line was, not alone pictorially, but practically, right at hand! barely beyond sight and hearing or the feel of its tremor; a veritable back garden wall to them and their beloved city; as close as forts Jackson and St. Philip, her front gate.  Yes, and—­Anna