Free Joelle's Secret by Gilbert Morris

long-armed. There wasn’tany fat on him. His jaws were sharp, and his nose had a small break at the bridge. He had not shaved recently, and there was a rough look about him. His cheeks were sunken as if he hadn’t eaten regularly. He looked vulnerable for all his apparent toughness.
    Joelle studied him, wondering what would come of this, and something began to creep into her mind. The man somehow looked familiar. “That can’t be,” she muttered. “I’ve never seen him before.” He had jet-black hair and a V-shaped face. She struggled to remember, and suddenly it came to her.
    “Why, he looks like my Uncle Caleb, the one my ma talked about so much!” She had never seen Caleb, for he had died young, but she had seen pictures of him, and her mother had said, “He had the blackest hair you ever saw and kind of a funny-shaped face, broad at the top and down to a sharp chin.” This man looked like that, and for one moment Joelle remembered her mother’s dream. A man will come to help you just like my brother helped me.
    Joelle tucked the covers around the man more securely. She filled a bowl of stew and sat down to eat it slowly, staring at the man and wondering what these events all meant.

Chapter Seven
    SOMETIMES COLD SEIZED HIM, with an iron icy grip, making him tremble from head to foot and his teeth chatter. It was not a cold like any he had ever experienced, for it seemed to go clear to the bone, and the pain that came with it made him want to cry out—which he thought he did from time to time.
    But at times the crushing, bone-squeezing cold would leave, and he would heat up like a furnace. His face would feel as if it were burning up and crinkling as if thrown into a fire, and the rest of his body was gripped with the heat as well.
    Occasionally he would come out of the darkness as if he were a man trying to escape from a prison far underground filled with pain. Sometimes light hurt his eyes. The sound of a voice floated to him from a far distance, and someone’s hands would touch him—but then he would go back down into the hole again.
    Now the heat and the cold were gone. He heard a sound he couldn’t identify. He knew he was lying flat on his back, and as he tried to sort out what was happening, he realized that he heard a sizzling sound and over that was a voice of someone singing. He didn’t know the voice or the tune, nordid he know what the sizzling sound was, and he felt himself slipping away again.
    Determined to stay in the land of the living, he forced himself to open his eyes. At first he couldn’t see and was aware that a lamp mounted on the wall was casting an amber light over the room. He was staring up at a ceiling made of loosely jointed boards, and the roughness of the blanket over him caused him to move to avoid it.
    Throwing the cover back, he lifted his head and saw that he was in a small room and that someone was standing beside a stove cooking something. That explained the sizzling sound. He tried desperately to think where he was, but he could remember only his cell in the prison. He studied the cook who was dressed in a pair of baggy pants and an oversized shirt. He couldn’t see the face, and he called out in a voice that seemed to creak with lips that were dry as parchment.
    “Where—where is this place?” His voice was rusty, and he tried to sit up.
    “Well, you decided not to die.”
    Owen licked his lips and peered at a young man who turned from the stove, put a fork down, and came over to him.
    “What’s wrong with me?”
    “You’ve been sick. Real sick. Didn’t know whether you were going to make it or not.”
    “Can I have some water?”
    “Oh, sure. You must be dry as a bone.” The young fellow moved across the small room to a bucket, picked up a large white cup, and dipped it in. He came back and said, “Here, hold your head up.” Owen felt the hand pulling his head upward,and then the cup touched his lips. He swallowed noisily and with his hand forced it