Mignon

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This story moves against the background of the Red River Expedition to Western Louisiana in the year 1864, toward the end of the Civil War, or the War Between the States, as the South prefers to call it. The military aspects of that campaign have been strictly adhered to and, to the extent that they actually figure, have been depicted as they happened. The characters, however, are imaginary. Though it is hoped they are typical of their times, and though the enterprises that engage them are typical of the fiasco they took part in, they do not represent real persons, directly or under a disguise.

J.M.C.

It was Mardi Gras in New Orleans, February 9 of this year, 1864, but the extent to which I partook of the merry fun was not visible to the naked eye. I was there, I was lodged at a good hotel, I had cash in my jeans, but had reason for taking it easy. For one thing there was my leg with a sword-stab in it, my souvenir of Chancellorsville, which had got me a discharge from the Army but compelled me to walk with a stick and discouraged any jinks — high, low, or medium. For another, there was my partner in the business that had brought me to town, and the job he had dumped on my head through a dumb miscalculation. He was a naval lieutenant my own age, which was and is twenty-eight, and had worked with me side by side in my father’s construction firm — Joseph Cresap & Co., at Annapolis, Maryland — he running the tug, I the piledriver. When the war broke we both signed on, he in the Navy, I with the Army, and for a time we kind of lost touch.

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