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The division over, the men of Fougeres rejoined the little battalion of the Blues on their way to the town. Towards midnight the cottage of Galope-Chopine, hitherto the scene of life without a care, was full of dread and horrible anxiety. Barbette and her little boy returned at the supper-hour, one with her heavy burden of rushes, the other carrying fodder for the cattle.
"Three Turkish gentlemen have quitted No. 11, Rue Barbette, but the Frenchman is still there. As it might be necessary to follow another person leaving this house, I stationed another watcher with my assistant, and this second man followed the Turks to a restaurant in the Grand Boulevard. So far as he could judge, they seemed to be excited and apprehensive.
Sumter, though a work three hundred by three hundred and fifty feet in size, with well-constructed walls and casemates of brick, was in very meager preparation for such a conflict. Of its forty-eight available guns, only twenty-one were in the casemates, twenty-seven being on the rampart en barbette.
The guns are entirely of steel and are mounted on Canet carriages in four barbette towers, one forward, one aft, and one on each side amidships. On the firing trials both the guns and all the Canet machinery, for working the guns and hoisting the ammunition, gave very great satisfaction to all present at the time.
On the left, looking down the bay from the Battery of Charleston, was, first, Castle Pinckney, a round brick fort, of two tiers of guns, one in embrasure, the other in barbette, built on a marsh island, which was not garrisoned.
In most cases the projectile gracefully bows, so to speak, and skips out of the muzzle of the gun, though sometimes the big breech block will be shattered. With eager eyes Tom and Ned watched the preparations for firing the big gun. The charge of powder was hoisted out of the bomb-proof chamber below the barbette, and then the great projectile was brought up in slings.
It was a casemated brick structure, pentagonal in form, carrying in barbette over the casemates twenty-seven cannon of and above the size of thirty-two pounders, besides eleven twenty-four pounders. In the casemates were fourteen of the latter caliber. Attached to this fort, but below it, was a water battery carrying half a dozen heavy cannon. Fort St.
Then followed a most exciting and perplexing chase through many streets, and it was only by the exercise of the utmost discretion that Brett finally located his man at a definite number in the Rue Barbette, a tiny thoroughfare in the Temple district. By this time dawn was advancing over Paris, and the streets were beginning to fill with early workers.
On the same day, a house directly opposite to us in Moultrieville, at the nearest point, was suddenly removed, disclosing a formidable masked battery, which effectually enfiladed two rows of our upper tier of guns in barbette, and took a third tier in reverse. It was a sad surprise to us, for we had our heaviest metal there.
"Really, Brett," he said, "I hate to grumble at anything you propose, because you are always right; but you must pardon me for saying that I do not see what particular value my presence here has been to you." "What!" laughed Brett; "not after your dramatic appearance in the Rue Barbette this morning?" "Oh, any one could have done that. All I had to do was to break in a door at a given hour."
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