FSF, March-April 2010 by Spilogale Authors Page B

well-armed men had no reason to fear him. But Quant said the Headsman had caught the eye of a devil who would follow him wherever he went. After the corporal fell asleep, Schulz recorded his comment, adding that his roommate also believed in ghosts, witches, and salamanders, and was, all in all, the strangest preacher he'd ever met.
    * * * *
    "In my long life,” Corman went on, after a moment of silence, “I've often noticed a peculiar tendency of disasters to follow one another, like sheep trailing the bellwether. Next morning, when Schulz checked the barracks, he found that the rest of the flock had begun to arrive."
    Three soldiers complained of fever. At first Schulz diagnosed malaria, a common affliction at the time, distressing but not usually fatal, and dosed them with quinine. That afternoon, just as the storm was arriving in full force, two more fell sick. Schulz and Quant now abandoned the officers’ quarters and moved in with their men. By nightfall the situation had become truly grim—the old wooden barracks shaking and shuddering in a gale that may have reached a hundred miles an hour, the five patients either burning with fever or shaking with cold, teeth rattling in their heads like dice.
    Schulz was also concerned about his prisoner. The man was his responsibility, and he had to save him if only for the gallows. Fighting the wind at every step, the sergeant struggled back down into Casemate Five, accompanied by Quant carrying a lantern. They found Gabriel Letourneau standing to his knees in water that had seeped through the barriers and gazing at them with the dumb supplication of a caged animal. Schulz ordered him to extend his hands between the bars, manacled them, and only then opened the cell door. Bent double, the three men fought their way back to the barracks through horizontal rain that stung like birdshot. When a gust almost bowled Quant over, Letourneau grabbed him by the arm and pulled him upright again.
    Once inside, Schulz added leg irons to the prisoner's manacles, leaving thirty inches of chain between his ankles so that he could shuffle around. He considered cuffing Letourneau's hands behind his back, but that would have left him helpless, forcing the soldiers to feed him, give him water, and even help him use the so-called honey bucket. Since they already had plenty to do, between nursing their sick comrades and trying to keep the barracks from coming apart, he left the prisoner's hands in front, manacled but still usable.
    Toward midnight the wind dropped suddenly. The eye of the storm was passing overhead. Schulz ventured outside into an eerie dead calm. He climbed the wall by the light of a serene half-moon at the summit of the sky, and gazed with astonishment at the pale encircling clouds of the eyewall. Later on, île du Sable received a second punch, the wind now rising from the northwest, but this round was much less violent, and by dawn the hurricane had passed inland, where it soon dispersed in gusts of torrential rain.
    But as the weather improved, the patients grew worse. Even to the untrained eye of a Yankee artillery sergeant, their disease clearly was not malaria, for instead of coming and going the fever was continuous, unrelenting.
    Hoping for sight of a relief ship, he splashed his way back to the wall. The Parade was ankle deep, and the rising sun shone everywhere on water, nothing but water. The storm tide was running high, and for the time being île du Sable had disappeared under the Gulf, only the walls of Fort Clay standing free. The floating dock had broken its moorings and become a raft, bucking and rolling its way northward toward a shoreline that no longer existed.
    Schulz realized that the garrison was stuck for days, maybe a week or longer, until somebody ashore remembered them and sent a rescue boat with an engine powerful enough to make headway against the sea. Until then, they had to survive on what they had—barrels of drinking water, tin canisters of