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Updated: May 5, 2025
An order was now brought to the ironclads by Fleet-Surgeon Palmer for them to attack the ram, but as they stood for her, she seemed again to move as if retiring toward the fort, but the Chickasaw overtook her, and after a short engagement, succeeded in forcing her to surrender, having shot away her smoke-stack, destroyed her steering gear, and jammed her afterparts so that her stern guns were rendered useless.
There was the insistent calling of "all aboard" from this quarter and that; then slowly the great locomotive began to move. Its bell was ringing, its steam hissing, its smoke-stack throwing aloft a great black plume of smoke that fell back over the cars like a pall. The fireman, conscious of the heavy load behind, flung open a flaming furnace door to throw in coal.
We saw her, from one of the upper porticoes, when she was just on the edge of the horizon, and we knew her by the way she stood up high in the water, and rolled her smoke-stack from side to side. She was the greatest roller that ever floated, I reckon, but a jolly good ship for all that; and we were glad enough to see her. There were a lot of letters for us in her mail.
Only great heaps of ashes, twisted iron, a lone smoke-stack and great piles of ruined machinery, were left to tell the story, where for many years the whirl of industry had made music beside Pine Tree Creek. Yet the man who had once sworn to shoot his enemy at sight uttered no complaint or showed the least spirit of revenge.
All one afternoon he labored, wheeling it in a steel barrow and dumping it in front of the furnace. Where the smoke-stack led to and what condition it was in he knew not. He could not tell where the gases of combustion would escape to; but this he decided to leave to chance.
The cockleshell of the Atlantic billows had become a thing of pride in the shelter of Farewell Cove. Her predecessor, the Lizzie, had never risen above her humble station. Her decks were wide and clean. Her smoke-stack had something purposeful in its proportions. The bridge was set high and possessed a spacious chart house. She had an air of importance not usual to the humble coasting packet.
Even while I watched the pantomime I was sliding off my boots, and it had not been consummated a second before I had them in my arms and was tripping over the mud in my stocking feet. A dozen noiseless steps and I was over the bulwarks between the wheel and the smoke-stack, casting about for a hiding-place.
Fifty-two of these projectiles were fired from the Chickasaw in the short half-hour of her attack. The exposed rudder-chains were shot away, and at nearly the same time the smoke-stack came down. Admiral Buchanan was wounded by an iron splinter, which broke his leg and otherwise injured it to such an extent that the limb was with difficulty saved.
While waiting for Doctor Wilhelm, absorbed in these reflections, Frederick involuntarily turned away from the edge of the deck, and became aware of a dark mass not far from the smoke-stack, cowering in a corner against the wall. The thing looked strange to him.
And the set of his jaws and the wrinkling of his forehead showed that the duel between him and Colonel Ward was not yet over. As the steamer with the dun smoke-stack approached Cod Lead he noted sourly the frantic signallings of the marooned. He leaned on the rail and watched the departure of the officer of the faded blue cap with his crew of the sponson boat.
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