She welcomed us with as warm a show of hospitality as she had ever made in the old days of lavish entertainment.
After our first inquiries concerning their welfare, she said to us laughingly: “I wouldn’t keep you to-night, but would send you on to a better place, if I knew any better in the neighborhood. As it is, you’ll have to sleep under the trees for lack of room; but you boys are rather used to that. As for supper, I can give you some corn-bread and some sorghum molasses. The bread won’t be very good, because our supply of salt has run out, and of course as the cows have all been killed I can’t give you butter. But there’s enough bread and sorghum, anyhow.”
“How long since you had meat?” I asked.
“About three weeks,” she replied. “That is to say, since the last big raiding party came by.”
“Have you no pigs left?”
“No, we haven’t a living animal of any kind.”
“Whose sheep are those I saw as I rode up?”
“They belong to a neighbor,” she answered. “They’re what’s left of a large flock. When the raiders were here those five sheep ran into the bushes and escaped. But even if they were ours, you know, we couldn’t kill one.”
I remembered then that a law of the Confederacy made it a crime severely punishable to slaughter a sheep, even one’s own. They were wanted by the government for their wool to clothe the army.
Waiving all this aside as a matter of small moment, our hostess pressed us again to dismount for supper.