Content Warning: This section contains discussions of sexual assault and attempted assault. This section also reproduces an insensitive, outdated racial slur via a quotation.

Once Scarlett gives birth to a scrawny little girl named Ella, who resembles Frank, she feels free to resume management of her two mills. Assaults on white women by freed Black men have become so common around Atlanta that Frank forbids Scarlett to travel alone. Melanie sends along one of her many charity cases to act as a bodyguard. He is a rough mountain man with a peg leg and one eye. His off-putting appearance, gun, and knife are effective deterrents to trouble. The man’s name is Archie, and Scarlett belatedly learns that he was a convict imprisoned for murdering his adulterous wife, but the Confederacy freed him to fight for the cause:

Archie and Scarlett were a queerly assorted pair, the truculent dirty old man with his wooden peg sticking stiffly out over the dashboard and the pretty, neatly dressed young woman with forehead puckered in an abstracted frown (964).

Scarlett is having trouble filling lumber orders because Ashley is a poor manager, and many day laborers only show up when they wish.