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As boys, back in sixty-one, they had gone out together. Side by side, each with his arm over the other's shoulder, they had stood up with a hundred others to be sworn into the service of the Confederate States of America; and on the morning they went away Miss Sally May Ghoulson had given the older brother her silk scarf off her shoulders to wear for a sash.
In a dour, grim silence they took the fortunes of those last hard, hopeless days and after the surrender down in Mississippi they came back with the limping handful that was left of the company; and in age they were all boys still but in experience, men, and in suffering, grandsires. Two months after they got back Miss Sally May Ghoulson was married to Edward, the younger brother.
In a month or two months, or at most three months, they would all be tramping home again, covered with glory and the spoils of war, and then this by common report and understanding Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman would be married, with a big church wedding. The Yankees, however, unaccountably fought, and it was not a ninety-day picnic after all. It was not any kind of a picnic.
And when it was over, after four years and a month, Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman did not marry. It was just before the battle of Chickamauga when the other men in the company first noticed that the two Tilghmans had become as strangers, and worse than strangers, to each other. They quit speaking to each other then and there, and to any man's knowledge they never spoke again.
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