Local Color by Irvin S. Cobb

It was the year after the yellow fever that Major Foxmaster moved out from Virginia; that would make it the year 1876. And the next year the woman came. For Major Foxmaster her coming was inopportune. It is possible that she so timed it with that very thing in mind. To order her own plans with a view to the upsetting and the disordering of his plans may have been within the scope of her general scheme. Through intent, perhaps, she waited until he had established himself here in his new environment, five hundred miles from tidewater, before she followed him.

Be this as it may, that was what happened. The Major came out in the spring of the year. He was pushing fifty then, a fine upstanding figure of a man -- what women, for lack of a better name, call distinguished looking. He had been a lieutenant in the Mexican War and a major in the Civil War -- on the Confederate side, of course, seeing that he came from the seaboard side and not from the mountainous flank of Virginia.