The soldier was still conscious. He told her of his wife, her name and where she lived, of his children, and of a ring in his pocket. He told her that when he was holding the horses one day while a battle was in progress, he had plucked some hairs from the mane of a horse and fashioned a ring as a gift for his wife. It was a crude thing, he said, entirely lacking in beauty, but he had woven his love into it. He hoped that in some way it could be conveyed to her.
The woman promised the dying man that his wish would be carried out, having faith that in some way she could fulfill her promise.
Satisfied by her promise, the soldier died quietly there on the pallet, toward evening of May 7, 1864.
The woman covered his body and left him there until nightfall. Under cover of darkness she returned with a woman servant, and together they laboriously dug a grave for him there in her yard. Before laying him to rest she searched his pockets and found the ring and two Confederate notes for fifty cents each, both issued April 6, 1863. Two Confederate notes and a ring made of horse-hair—the total possessions on his person.
The ring, as the soldier had said, was lacking in beauty, but it was skillfully made. He had fastened together a circle of horse-hair about the size of a slender woman's finger, then he had covered it by weaving a few strands of the hair around it, making a sort of button-hole stitch on both edges.
After the war had ended the woman managed in some way to fulfill her promise. She wrote the soldier's widow a letter telling her the details of her husband's death and enclosed the contents of his pockets. Whether the postal system had been restored in the region where the letter traveled, or whether it was conveyed by hand, is not known, but it did finally reach its destination.
As soon as it was possible, relatives of the bereaved family, an old man and a small boy, made a long, weary and sad journey by ox-cart from their home in the lower Northern Neck, through Fredericksburg to Spotsylvania Court House, a distance of more than a hundred miles, for the purpose of transporting the remains of their kinsman back to his homeland. When this mission was accomplished, the remains of the young Confederate sergeant were laid to rest in the family burial ground, near Burgess Store, in Northumberland County.
For many years the soldier's widow and the loyal Southern lady corresponded. Although they never did meet, their spirits were bound together by that common denominator—war.
MIRACLE AT KETCHUM'S CAMP
Toward the close of the Civil War the fortunes of the lower Northern Neck like those of the entire South were low. This section was then so isolated that news from the battlefields was long in coming, and usually bad when it did arrive. Food was meager and monotonous and, despite the ingenious efforts of the women, could only be stretched so far.