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"Well, Adh history books to recognize a Confederate States flag when I see one"

OUT OF A WORLD ALL Bur VANISHED, her brass stea white beneath her churning pandle wheels, and spewing black s twin stacks, the Stonewall Jackson pitched toward the towboat with the aard grace of a pregnant Southern belle hoisting her hooped skirts while crossing a mud puddle

Shrieking gulls rode the wind above a giant stern flag displaying the crossed bars and stars of the Confederacy, while on the roof of the texas deck, a man furiously pounded out the old South's national hymn, "Dixie," on the keyboard of an old-fashioned stea across the sea stirred the souls of thean adventure none would see again

In the ornate pilothouse, Pitt and Giordino stared at the barge and towboat that loomed closer with every revolution of the thirty-foot pandle wheels

"The ht," Giordino shouted above the steam whistle and calliope

"What man?" Pitt asked loudly

"The one who said, "Save your Confederate ain

"Lucky for us it has," Pitt said, s" This from a wiry little man isted the six-foot helm with both hands

"They've lost speed," Pitt concurred

"If the boilers don't blow, and the sweet old darling' holds together in these damned waves" The man at the wheel paused inwhitebearded head and let fly a spurt of tobacco juice with deadly accuracy into a brass cuspinor before continuing "We ought to overtake 'em in the next two miles"

Captain Melvin Belcheron had skippered the Stonewall Jackson for thirty of his sixty-two years He knew every buoy, bend, sandbar and riverbank light from St Louis to New Orleans by heart

But this was the first time he'd ever taken his boat into the open sea

The "sweet old darling"' was built in 1915 at Columbus, Kentucky, on the Ohio River Her like was the last to stoke the fires of i, and her like would never be seen again The sine, and the rhyth only in the history books

Her shalloooden hull was long and bea 270 feet by forty-four Her horizontal noncondensing engines ran at about forty revolutions per htly over one thousand tons, yet despite her bulk, she walked the water with a draft of just thirty-two inches

Down below on the main deck, four men, sweat-streaked and blackened with soot, furiously shoveled coal into the furnaces under four high-pressure boilers When the pressure began to creep into the red, the chief engineer, a crusty old Scot by the nae