The street mounted sharply and Elim passed an open space teeming with
hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the
flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces,
heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now
below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke
blotting out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important
thoroughfare now, and inquired again:
"Two, Linden Row?"
This man ejaculated:
"The Yankees are here!" The fact seemed to stupefy him, and he stood
with hanging hands and mouth.
Elim Meikeljohn repeated his query and was answered by a negro who had
joined them.
"On ahead, capt'n," he volunteered; "fourth turn past the capitol and
first crossing."
The other regained his speech and began to curse the negro and Elim,
but the latter moved swiftly on.
Above him, through the shifting tenebrous banks, he saw a classic white
building on a patch of incredible greenery, infinitely remote; and then
from the center of the city came a deafening explosion, a great sullen
sheet of flame, followed by flashes like lightning in the settling
blackness.
"The powder magazines," Elim heard repeated from person to person. An
irregular file of Confederate soldiers galloped past him, and the echo
of their hoofs had hardly died before a troop of mounted Union cavalry,
with slanting carbines, rode at their heels. They belonged, Elim
recognized, to Kautz' command.
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