The Believer Read Online Free PDF Page A

Elizabeth answered. She had been building a fire in the cookstove to ready their breakfast, and she dropped the stove lid back in place with a clang before she looked over at her father who was filling the coffeepot. "Colton has no love in his heart for me. He wants to own me. I know not why, but I do know I could not bear his touch on me:" She couldn't suppress a shiver at the thought of it.
    "Why is he so repulsive to you?" Her father set the coffeepot on the stove before turning to Elizabeth with a slight frown as he tried to understand her aversion to Colton. "He seems decent enough. He lets us stay on here in his cabin without much in return except a few hours' labor now and again. He always says I can pay him later. The man has simply had bad luck with the women in his life'
    "Perhaps for a reason" Elizabeth's heart seemed afraid to beat inside her chest as she stared at her father. "Please, I beg of you, don't ask me to encourage his attentions"
    "Worry not, my daughter. I would never ask you to marry for any reason other than love:" When he reached over to touch her cheek with tenderness, Elizabeth's heart had started beating normally again. "I want you to know love as your mother and I did'
    Her father had understood. He had promised to find a way to pay for the cabin, to keep Colton at arm's length. But now her father was gone. Dead in one day. She'd thought to send Payton after the doctor at first light. Even the cholera didn't take its victims so quickly. Two days, three, but not overnight.
    Her father feared it was the cholera when he took sick. He'd been to Springfield where in the summer so many had sickened and died from the dreaded illness, but they'd heard of no cholera deaths for weeks. Still, he had vomited until blood mixed with the bile in the basin she held for him.
    If it was the cholera, she might not have to worry about what the next weeks would bring. They might all die in the week to come. Cholera oft swept through a family with no pity.
    "You're not dead yet," Elizabeth whispered to herself. When she touched her father's cheek, the lifeblood had left it already. She pulled the quilt up over his face and went back to sit in the chair by the bed to wait for the morning light. A person couldn't just sit and wait for the death angel to come for her. She would have to do something. Plan a way to continue to live. She and Payton and Hannah.
    "Please, dear God, show me another way besides Colton Linley." She listened intently as if she expected a spoken reply. There was none. Only the dreadful silence of her father's still body under the quilt.
    At first light she built up the fire in the woodstove and fetched water from the spring to heat in order to prepare her father's body for burial. She had to wake Payton to help her, because her father was too heavy for her to lift and turn on her own.
    Tears streamed down Payton's face as he looked down on their father's body. "Why didn't you wake me so I could tell him goodbye?"
    "I'm sorry, but I had no warning. He just stopped breathing.
    "Then it was an easy passing:"
    She saw no purpose in telling Payton about the terrible heaving and ragged breathing. "He did not linger in pain"
    "Was it the cholera?" A touch of fear widened the boy's brown eyes that were so like their father's. Their mother used to laugh about how Elizabeth's father and Payton were the pretty ones in the family. They both had long lashes around their deep brown eyes and wavy dark hair falling over their foreheads. Elizabeth looked like her mother, straight brown hair, a no-nonsense square jaw, and green eyes flecked with gold.
    Elizabeth met Payton's eyes without wavering and told the truth. "I don't know." Sometimes the truth was all she had.
    Hannah came creeping into the room. When she saw their father's body, she shuddered, but she didn't cry. Hannah was not like anyone else in the family. Her almost-white hair sprang out in wild curls around her face, and her eyes were such a light