The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

was Vicksburg too: the yelling was in it, the embattled, the iron-worn, the supremely invincible) into his hand. “I know hit,” he said. “Hit come from hind the smokehouse. You brung a lot of hit.”
    “Yes,” I said. “I brought enough to last.”
    We soaked the cuttings every time we stopped and opened the basket, and there was some of the food left on the fourth day because at least once a day we stopped at houses on the road and ate with them, and on thesecond night we had supper and breakfast at the same house. But even then Granny would not come inside to sleep. She made her bed down in the wagon by the chest and Joby slept under the wagon with the gun beside him like when we camped on the road. Only it would not be exactly on the road but back in the woods a way; on the third night Granny was in the wagon and Joby and Ringo and I were under the wagon and some cavalry rode up and Granny said, “Joby! the gun!” and somebody got down and took the gun away from Joby and they lit a pine knot and we saw the gray.
    “Memphis?” the officer said. “You cant get to Memphis. There was a fight at Cockrum yesterday and the roads ahead are full of Yankee patrols. How in hell—Excuse me, ma’am” (behind me Ringo said, “Git the soap”) “—you ever got this far I dont see. If I were you, I wouldn’t even try to go back, I’d stop at the first house I came to and stay there.”
    “I reckon we’ll go on,” Granny said, “like John—Colonel Sartoris told us to. My sister lives in Memphis; we are going there.”
    “Colonel Sartoris?” the officer said. “Colonel Sartoris told you?”
    “I’m his mother-in-law,” Granny said. “This is his son.”
    “Good Lord, ma’am! You cant go a step further. Dont you know that if They captured you and this boy, They could almost force him to come in and surrender?”
    Granny looked at him, she was sitting up in thewagon and her hat was on. “My experience with Yankees has evidently been different from yours. I have no reason to believe that their officers—I suppose they still have officers among them—will bother a woman and two children. I thank you, but my son has directed us to go to Memphis. If there is any information about the roads which my driver should know, I will be obliged if you will instruct him.”
    “Then let me give you an escort.—Or better still, there is a house about a mile back; return there and wait. Colonel Sartoris was at Cockrum yesterday, by tomorrow night I believe I can find him and bring him to you.”
    “Thank you,” Granny said. “Wherever Colonel Sartoris is, he is doubtless busy with his own affairs. I think we will continue to Memphis as he instructed us.”
    So they rode away and Joby came back under the wagon and put the musket between us only every time I turned over I rolled on it so I made him move it and he tried to put it in the wagon with Granny and she wouldn’t let him so he leaned it against a tree and we slept and ate breakfast and went on, with Ringo and Joby looking behind every tree we passed. “You aint going to find them behind a tree we have already passed,” I said. We didn’t. We had passed where a house had burned and then we were passing another house with an old white horse looking at us out of the stable door behind it and then I saw six men running in the next field and then we saw a dustcloud coming fast out of a lane that crossed the road; Joby said, “Them folkslook like they trying to make the Yankees take they stock, running hit up and down the big road in broad daylight like that.” They rode right out of the dustcloud without seeing us at all, crossing the road and the first ten or twelve had already jumped the ditch with pistols in their hands like when you run with a stick of stove wood balanced on your palm, and the last ones came out of the dust with five men running and holding to stirrups and us sitting there in the wagon with Joby holding the mules like they were sitting down