The baby was found in the middle of a battlefield somewhere in Virginia during the Civil War. After the battle, there were dead and injured soldiers all over the place, with discarded muskets that had to be checked and gathered up. But they found this baby in a basket crying, and she had apparently been left there by someone figuring that the authorities would gather her up and take care of her.

They did that, though it took them a while and she went a few days without proper care. By the time she found a loving home, it had been a couple of weeks, but the home she ended up in seemed to work for her and she grew up in a farm family in western Virginia for the next fifteen years.

Nowadays DNA testing would tell you exactly where she came from and who had put her there in that battlefield, but in this case we don't know so we just have to take their word for it that this was what happened.

Meg was a poor girl who lived about five miles from the battlefield. She had been married less than a year when the war came through and her husband, Caleb, went off to fight it on the Confederate side. He was not actually so enthusiastic about the Confederate side itself, but his friends had all gone and had pressured him to go with them, and to stay home would make it seem like he was a deserter or traitor.

But, since they were farmers, things began to go downhill for Meg right away, especially when the new baby came. A local woman had come to help with the delivery, but Meg's mother had died before the baby was born, so she really had no source of support at home. She had two brothers who had gone off to fight as well, but she had no sisters and nobody to ask for help or to move in with. She ate up the food she got from her mother's house, but her mother didn't own that house and the owners were glad to get it back. She tried hiring herself out in the community but with the baby that became harder. Pretty soon she was hungry.

When the war swept through the area she knew that the local boys were using the old field out past the river, but the northern side knew that too and attacked them right there. Meg was hiding in the woods when it happened. She had taken the baby out to the river not knowing what to do, and they were both hungry, the baby crying and Meg crying inside. She couldn't take it anymore. When the battle was over, and both sides had retreated in different directions, she set the baby in the middle of the field and walked home.

Her plan was to go out west somewhere where nobody would know her, but she clung to the hope that Caleb somehow would come back from the war. Instead of leaving the area - she had no money for a bus ticket anyway - she found her way to Charlottesville and worked as a waitress in a small restaurant. The restaurant owner gave her a room to live in.

The war finally ended and things got back to normal to some degree, but Caleb never came home. Sometimes he would appear in her dreams; she would be in the woods, peering out at the battle, and somebody would kill him, or he would kill someone, or someone would come chasing after her and the baby. She would wake up in a cold sweat screaming.

She had an old friend, Esther, in the town she had left, and Esther had promised to inform her if Caleb ever came back to that town looking for her. The problem really was that Esther might not have known, if he DID come back. Esther worked in a bakery, and a lot of people came through the bakery, but would Caleb have come there looking for her? Not many people had known Meg, as she'd lived out in the country; few knew that she'd married; even fewer knew that she'd been pregnant. The war had disrupted everything.

One day a man came into her restaurant and, to make a long story short, he ended up proposing to her. He lived out in the country, in fact not that far from where she had been. He did not know her, or Caleb, or her back story before he walked into that restaurant. He was a horse dealer and was fairly successful. She agreed to marry him and moved with him out to his place in the country. She eventually told him about the baby and about Caleb. The war had disrupted lots of marriages, though. It was not unusual for people to be starting over.

So she was living with this horse dealer, Alvin, and had married him and was now pregnant with his child, and was back in her original town doing an errand. She stopped in on Esther, who told her that Caleb was back. Caleb had come to the bakery two days earlier, and had enquired about Meg, and Esther had told him that Meg had moved to Charlottesville. Esther knew that something was up with Alvin but omitted that from the story so as not to make Caleb mad. But Meg was shocked, and asked Esther what took Caleb so long to come back home. She'd thought he was dead.

Well, they had sent him off to fight in Georgia, and he'd been captured, and when they released him he had no money, and it was this kind of story, The Confederate Army had just kind of fallen apart at the end there, and was unable to even get him home to where he was from.

Just as Esther was relating Caleb's story to Meg, there in the bakery on a clear fall morning, Caleb walked into the bakery. He and Meg recognized each other instantly. He walked up very close to her, but did not reach out to hold her. She filled up with the stress of everything that had happened: the hunger, the giving up of the farm, the abandonment of the baby; she had not forgotten any of it. She told him there was a baby and the baby was in the area somewhere. He slapped her hard across the face and ran out of the bakery.

He was never seen in the town again, and this was lucky for her, because she now had another baby to worry about, and she didn't really want to get Alvin involved. She stopped in at Esther's bakery about once a month and asked every time about Caleb, but Caleb had apparently left town and was not pursuing the issue.

About three years after that incident, she was in the bakery when a farm family of four, mother and three children, came in. The youngest child was about five and had the distinct look of Meg and Caleb both. She was sure that this was her child. She watched the child carefully, and the child noticed her, too, but she was busy taking care of her new toddler, and they didn't really have time to talk.

Caleb was killed in a gunfight in Colorado; he'd robbed a train in Missouri and was by then an outlaw. He was still angry about his wife and had somehow sensed that she'd remarried and he'd lost her. He'd been injured in the war and also knew he'd never be able to keep up the farm, or at least not for long. He was better off just using the gun for what it was for, and run that out until the end, which he did. He spoke her name as he was dying, on the barrom floor in Colorado, but nobody knew any Meg and they buried him out in the wash behind the bar. Years later genealogists came looking for the parents of the young girl, as she'd grown up and had eight children, but could find no evidence of who her birth parents were, and had to wait for the possibility that DNA testing might uncover the truth.