By 1865 the armies were dispersing. The men were winding their way home, tired, dispirited and shattered at killing their brothers. The Union soldier may have had some uplift in the belief that his side was victorious, if, in a bloody family conflict, their can be any victors. But for the men of the Confederate army, the return home was a long, weary road, with no hope left and very little joy. So Ned Parsons, volunteered at seventeen, and not yet twenty-one, found his return to the Texas farm he had left with his father four long years ago.