Love comes to a couple just as a family crisis arises and the clouds of war loom on the horizon. Will Castleberry has just taken a wife rather late in his life. A registered letter arrives for him at the post office in Channahatchee, Alabama. His sister in Georgia has died, just 4 years after her husband. Her 6 children will be orphans unless he takes them in and asks his new wife to help him to raise them. The nation is on the verge of rending itself asunder, an action that Will knows will bode badly for the south. Getting them to Alabama and getting his expanded family through the coming...

Will and Nancy Castleberry continue to deal with the deprivations of the war that is now lost, the tragic death of a neighbor, making sure that the death is properly reported to the authorities, which are almost non-existent, and resisting the parasitical characters, appearing out of nowhere and attempting to take what is not theirs.