General, Stop Teasing Me

The man who took the double-heart knot with Ella Warner at her wedding was Neil Langley. His older brother Owen, the one she was marrying, was too sick to get out of bed. Owen left a letter of divorce behind him and died. Neil enlisted and went out to the frontier. Ella stayed in the Langley house with a little girl and her husband's grandmother to feed. She set up a stall on the street selling tofu pudding and kept the three of them on it. Ten years on Neil came back a general with a record nobody could argue with. He turned down what the court meant to give him and said he would marry his brother's widow, and the court took that badly. Everyone put it down to a debt owed to the family. On the frontier, in the cold, what had held him together were her letters and the knee pads and underclothes she had sewn and sent out to him.