Choices of the Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

I found you so you can see for yourself. Look.”
    Griff didn’t want to look. He wanted to ride east and find Zach and Hannah and the lady.
    But he dismounted and looked. Not enough rain had fallen in the past three weeks to have reached through the canopy of branches overhead or the pine boughs of Bethann’s making to hide the signs of where Griff had fallen as he attempted to dismount from his horse with a knife blade sticking out of his side. Leaves and pine needles lay crushed into a hollow. A brief outcropping of rock bore a splash of darkness. Blood. Nothing else showed signs of the ambush.
    He scowled at Bethann. “I don’t see any signs. In fact—” His hand pressed to his side. “What happened to the knife?”
    “Good question, that.” Bethann’s upper lip curled. “Took it with him so’s we didn’t recognize it. But he left this behind when he pulled the blade out, I expect.”
    She lifted aside the bough of a cedar tree. Beyond it, the brambles of a wild rose wrapped around the outcropping of rock and struggled to reach the light. And from those briars dangled several strands of pale yellow hair. The butter-yellow of Zach’s hair. Hannah’s too. Hundreds of people’s hair.
    But hundreds of people hadn’t been up the trail in the past three weeks. A few dozen, perhaps. Several possessed that gleaming pale gold. But few would have reason to duck into the depression beneath the tree.
    Griff’s gut ached from his belly to the mostly healed stab wound. “Not enough proof.”
    “Stubborn mule.” Bethann bent and plucked something from a lower thorn on the wild rose. “What about this too?”
    She held up a strip of buckskin perhaps a finger long and half as wide as a pinkie. Fringe from a hunting shirt. Plain, brown, well-worn. Nothing distinguished it from the shirt Griff wore now, as the homespun one he’d donned for the journey had been ruined.
    Then Bethann laid it across his palm, and he saw the difference. Stamped into the underside of the leather were two letters—ZB. Their mothers had started stamping their clothes when they were small to help know whose was whose when they left bits behind at the swimming hole or a field or any number of places.
    “Tiresome problem, him losing the one bit of fringe with his letters on it,” Griff mused aloud. He flashed a gaze at his sister’s grim face. “Or does his momma put them on every fringe?”
    Of course she didn’t. No woman had that kind of time.
    Bethann shrugged. “Can’t change what I found. But with the fringe and the yeller hair, looks kinda bad, don’t you think?”
    “Right bad.” Griff tucked the bit of fringe into his trouser pocket and returned to his gelding.
    He turned the roan east to meet up with Zach and Hannah and Miss Esther Cherrett, to place as much distance between the ambush place and himself as possible. Out of sight, out of mind. When he met up with Zach, saw his cousin and friend’s smiling, bright face, he would know for certain Bethann was mistaken. The ambusher was a stranger thinking to rob him, or one of Zach’s cousins thinking to get rid of one more Tolliver out on the trail and away from the rest of the families. Anyone else. Despite the hatred reigning in the rest of the family, Zach and Griff refused to let it poison their friendship. Nothing, they had vowed before the traveling preacher and one another, would come between their efforts to bring peace back to the ridge.
    He met up with his cousins and the new schoolma’am the following day. Wood-smoke aromas slowed their pace. A quarter mile down the road, a familiar giggle and accompanying light laugh joined that of another voice, something clear and sharp, a little brittle like new ice.
    Griff held up his hand for Bethann to halt and reined in his own mount. “Zach? Hannah?” he called to them without approaching.
    The merriment stopped. Underbrush rustled, and Zach’s mop of yellow hair emerged from the trees. “Griff, you’re