for the heavier transports to come.  Presently the General came back to a plantation half under water, where Black Bayou joins Deer Creek, to hurry the work in cleaning out that Bayou.  The light transports meanwhile were bringing up more troops from a second detachment.  All through the Friday the navy great guns were heard booming in the distance, growing quicker and quicker, until the quivering air shook the hanging things in that vast jungle.  Saws stopped, and axes were poised over shoulders, and many times that day the General lifted his head anxiously.  As he sat down in the evening in a slave cabin redolent with corn pone and bacon, the sound still hovered among the trees and rolled along the still waters.

The General slept lightly.  It was three o’clock Saturday morning when the sharp challenge of a sentry broke the silence.  A negro, white eyed, bedraggled, and muddy, stood in the candle light under the charge of a young lieutenant.  The officer saluted, and handed the General a roll of tobacco.

“I found this man in the swamp, sir.  He has a message from the Admiral—­”

The General tore open the roll and took from it a piece of tissue paper which he spread out and held under the candle.  He turned to a staff officer who had jumped from his bed and was hurrying into his coat.

“Porter’s surrounded,” he said.  The order came in a flash.  “Kilby Smith and all men here across creek to relief at once.  I’ll take canoe through bayou to Hill’s and hurry reenforcements.”

The staff officer paused, his hand on the latch of the door.

“But your escort, General.  You’re not going through that sewer in a canoe without an escort!”

“I guess they won’t look for a needle in that haystack,” the General answered.  For a brief second he eyed the lieutenant.  “Get back to your regiment, Brice, if you want to go,” he said.

Stephen saluted and went out.  All through the painful march that followed, though soaked in swamp water and bruised by cypress knees, he thought of Sherman in his canoe, winding unprotected through the black labyrinth, risking his life that more men might be brought to the rescue of the gunboats.

The story of that rescue has been told most graphically by Sherman himself.  How he picked up the men at work on the bayou and marched them on a coal barge; how he hitched the barge to a navy tug; how he met the little transport with a fresh load of troops, and Captain Elijah Brent’s reply when the General asked if he would follow him.  “As long as the boat holds together, General.”  And he kept his word.  The boughs hammered at the smoke-pipes until they went by the board, and the pilothouse fell like a pack of cards on the deck before they had gone three miles and a half.  Then the indomitable Sherman disembarked, a lighted candle in his hand, and led a stiff march through thicket and swamp and breast-deep backwater, where the little drummer boys carried their drums on their heads.  At length, when they were come to some Indian mounds, they found a picket of three, companies of the force which had reached the flat the day before, and had been sent down to prevent the enemy from obstructing further the stream below the fleet.