Read "Two Little Confederates" by Thomas Nelson Page online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
These hens were not the last things stolen from Oakland. Nearly all / the men in the country had gone with the army. Indeed, with the / exception of a few overseers who remained to work the farms, every man / in the neighborhood, between the ages of seventeen and fifty, was in / the army. The country was thus left almost wholly unprotected, and it / would have been entirely so but for the "Home Guard," as it was / called, which was a company composed of young boys and the few old men / who remained at home, and who had volunteered for service as a local / guard, or police body, for the neighborhood of their homes.
Occasionally, too, later on, a small detachment of men, under a leader / known as a "conscript-officer," would come through the country hunting / for any men who were subject to the conscript law but who had evaded / it, and for deserters who had run away from the army and refused to / return.