Free Joelle's Secret by Gilbert Morris Page B

mean?”
    “Yes. Was there for the last two years.”
    “What’d you do?”
    “Got into a ruckus, shot a fellow.”
    “You killed him?”
    “No, I didn’t kill him. They thought he was going to die. As a matter of fact, it was with his gun. He pulled it on me, and I tried to take it away from him, and he got shot in the scuffle.”
    Owen saw that Jones was staring at him with a strange expression. “It wouldn’t have mattered so much, but he was the son of the lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Wrong fellow for me to shoot.”
    “I guess that was pretty bad being in jail.”
    “Worse thing I can think of. I think I’d die before I’d go back there.”
    Owen found himself getting sleepy. “Could I have a cup of that coffee, do you think? I’m getting sleepy again, and I want something to keep me awake.”
    Joelle filled a cup with coffee. “You want milk and sugar?”
    “Just sugar.”
    Joelle added a spoonful of sugar, stirred it, and came back. “I doubt this will keep you awake,” she said. She watched as he drank it and then took the cup. “You lie down there. I’m going to go get Doc Crandell and have him look you over. You haven’t coughed for a time. I thought for a while you were going to cough your lungs out.”
    “So did I.” Those were the last words Owen could speak. He knew there was something he ought to say, and as he slipped off, he suddenly remembered. He lifted his hand and whispered, “Well, thanks!” He drifted off then, and this time the hole was not as black nor as frightening as it had been.
    * * *
    “STAND STILL, GENERAL. YOU’RE too feisty! Look out! Don’t nip me like that!”
    Joelle was talking to a long-legged sorrel she had been grooming. She had become an expert groomer, and this horse belonged to the sheriff so she was extra careful with it. He was finicky about his horse and gave her specific instructions about his hooves and how he had to be groomed just so. She ran the curry comb over General’s back, then moved over to get some of the special feed the sheriff had provided.
    “That sheriff sure spoils you. Wish somebody would take such good of care of me.” Joelle carefully dipped the scoop, put grain in the feed box, and watched as General thrust his nose into it and began crunching. “You don’t have very good table manners, but you’re a handsome devil. I guess you know it too.”
    Joelle had formed the habit of talking to the horses she cared for. As she moved to the next horse, she was thinking about Owen Majors. It had been three days since he had come out of his fever, and he had been slow to recover. Dr. Crandell had said, “He got pretty well dehydrated. Hard to get fluids to a fellow that’s unconscious, but he’s going to be all right.”
    Joelle had fixed a bed for herself in the loft. The cold had broken so that although it still got into the lower twenties at night, she was all right. It had been interesting taking care of the big man, and she was still amazed at how much he looked like the description of her Uncle Caleb. She was a girl of vivid imagination and had heard stories all of her life about miracles happening.
    Her grandmother had told her once about an “appearing” of her husband, Joelle’s grandfather: “He was off working in the coal mine, and I was shelling peas, and suddenly I turned around, and he was standing right there. Like to have scared me to death. ‘What are you doing here, Albert?’ I asked him. He just smiled at me and didn’t say a word. I didn’t know what to do, and I closed my eyes, and when I looked up, he was gone. I knew something was wrong with all that, and when they come to tell me he had been killed in a cave-in, I tried to tell them I seen him. They thought I was losing my mind, but I know what I seen.”
    Joelle had heard her grandmother tell this many times, and she had been thinking about what her mother had said about her dream—that someone would come and take care of her exactly as her