As he approaches home, Bayard remembers "the first Yankee" he and Ringo "ever saw" (32). This is the Union cavalryman they shoot at in "Ambuscade," the first story in The Unvanquished series.
Colonel Sartoris' first military command was the regiment he raised at the beginning of the Civil War. Uncle Buck says Sartoris "bought and paid for" it, though no further details about that are provided (21). During the war's first year he led it as part of Stonewall Jackson's corps in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, but at the end of that year the soldiers voted him out of the command. According to Uncle Buck, that action proves that these men "wasn't a regiment of soldiers but a congress of politicians and fools" (21).
"The new pen" that Bayard and Ringo work on was made in the earlier story "Ambuscade," as a place to hide the Sartoris livestock from the Union troops who have become a presence in northern Mississippi. "Ambuscade" identifies its location as along the creek behind the plantation grounds, so we have located it there for this story.
This icon refers to the mounted unit of Confederate irregulars that ride with Colonel Sartoris. As Bayard says, unlike the first unit that Sartoris organized in Yoknapatawpha, it's "not a regiment," containing only "about fifty" men (22). Their main goal seems to be harassing the Union troops in Mississippi, though because of their numbers they often have to hide from the Yankees instead.
This is the soldier who misses capturing John Sartoris in the barn, and who then points his "carbine" directly at the two boys, Bayard and Ringo, "and shot at us pointblank" (34). He misses them too.
