Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read this ebook for free! No credit card needed, absolutely nothing to pay.
Words: 59400 in 16 pages
This is an ebook sharing website. You can read the uploaded ebooks for free here. No credit cards needed, nothing to pay. If you want to own a digital copy of the ebook, or want to read offline with your favorite ebook-reader, then you can choose to buy and download the ebook.
o fretful.
The log fire was burning low and in the dimness of the room she leaned down to the hearth, picked up a pine stick and lighted it. She held it close above the babe's face. The small eyes were open wide and strangely staring. Talithie passed the bright light to and fro before the little one's gaze. But never once did the babe bat a lash.
"Lord God Almighty!" Talithie cried, dropping the lighted pine to the floor. "Our babe is blind, Jasper! Blind, I tell you! Stone blind!"
Jasper leaped to his feet. The wooden bowl, the knife, clattered to the floor. The pine stick still burning lay where it had fallen.
"Our babe can't be blind," he moaned, falling to his knees. "Our helpless babe that's done no harm to any living soul, our spotless pure babe can't be so afflicted!" he sobbed bitterly, putting his arms about the two he loved best in all the world.
The pine stick where Talithie dropped it burned deep into the puncheon floor leaving a scar that never wore away.
Again old Granny Withers hobbled over the mountain as fast as she had the night she bore the news to Sabrina about the bat that flew over the fair bride's head. "Talithie's babe is blind--stone blind, Sabrina Ashby! Do you hear that?"
This time Widow Ashby's Sabrina did not cry out in glee. She did not clap her hands above her head and laugh wildly. The forsaken girl sank into a chair. Her face turned deathly white, she stared ahead, unseeing.
It was a long time before she spoke. Then there was no one there to hear. Granny Withers had scurried off in the dark and Widow Ashby--she was long since dead and gone.
"A toad in a bottle," the frightened Sabrina whispered and her voice echoed in the barren room, "a toad in a bottle works a conjure. Ma's gone and now Talithie's babe and Jasper's is plum stone blind." She swayed to and fro, crying hysterically. Then she buried her face in the vise of her hands, moaning, "Little Margie Tipton, your pretty blue eyes won't never 'tice no false true love away from no fair maid. And you, Mistress Jasper Tipton, you'll have many a long year for to ruminate such things through your own troubled mind."
Some shake their heads sympathetically, finger to brow, when they speak of Widow Ashby's Sabrina living alone in her ramshackle house far up at the head of Crockett's Hollow. "A forsaken girl that holds grudge and works conjure comes to be a sorry, sorry woman," they say.
Should you pass along that lonely creek and venture to call a cheery "Hallo!" only a weird, cackling laugh, a harsh "Begone" will echo in answer.
Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg
(0)More posts by @FreeBooks
