The Face of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

mimicked the bishop’s voice. “Who do you think they are? Lords and masters of a Virginia plantation?” He shouldered past the sheriff and shoved Lyndel’s father to one side. “We’re wasting time. And you’re breaking the law.”
    Lyndel watched Nathaniel spring to the staircase, blocking the man’s path. The man stopped, surprised. Then he handed his torch to one of his companions, all of whom were crowding into the house. He swung the stock of his rifle as hard as he could into Nathaniel’s stomach. Lyndel cried out and rushed down the staircase as Nathaniel gasped and his knees bent. But he would not fall and he held his ground, glaring at the slave hunter, his green eyes on fire.
    “Why, ain’t you a tough one for a Yankee.”
    The man swung his rifle into Nathaniel’s stomach two more timesas fast as he could. This time Nathaniel groaned and collapsed. The slave hunter ran up the stairs followed by six of his companions. Once they reached the second floor they began throwing open doors and brandishing torches and pointing pistol and rifles. Lyndel’s younger sisters began to scream. Their mother ran up the steps, calling out in Pennsylvania Dutch for the men to stop, and the bishop bolted up the steps behind his wife. Lyndel knelt by Nathaniel and lifted his head as the slave hunters charged to the third floor and one of them shouted, “Well, boys, look what we have here! What’s the matter, Charlie? Ain’t you happy to see me?”
    The man tugged Charlie out of bed and pushed him roughly toward the stairway. When they arrived at the second landing, the man shoved him forward down the final set of stairs and the slave landed with a cry of pain on top of Nathaniel. Immediately behind, Moses came tumbling down the steps after him. He had taken a gun-stock blow to the head. Tears streaking her cheeks, Lyndel covered all three men with her arms and shouted at the slave hunters, “Leave them alone! They have done nothing wrong!”
    The man who had struck Nathaniel with his rifle laughed from the second landing. “Why, yes they have, ma’am. Them slaves is plantation property, no different than the horses and cows and cotton fields. They ran, and that runnin’ is against the law. And your beau, well, he tried to prevent me from takin’ ’em and that’s what the legal folk call obstruction of justice.”
    He walked down the stairs, his boots thudding on the wood, his men behind him. Hauling Charlie and Moses upright he shackled their hands and their feet while another held his torch and gun. On the second floor Lyndel’s mother was hugging and kissing the three girls and telling them everything was going to be all right. Moses looked straight into Lyndel’s eyes, and at the pain in his eyes, she felt things falling down and breaking apart.
    “Back home, we’d burn your house to the ground for harborin’ and abettin’ fugitives,” the leader of the slave hunters said. “But ye’re godless Yankees and you don’t know no better.”
    Levi and the ministers had stayed rooted at the table during the forced entry into the home. Now Abraham Yoder stepped forward.
    “We need no lectures from you on godliness, you who would desecrate a man’s home and frighten his children and treat the guests sleeping under his roof worse than brute beasts.”
    The slave hunter grinned. “Why, they ain’t nothin’ but brute beasts, mister. That’s God’s truth.”
    Now Levi shook off his fear and shock and stood beside Pastor Yoder. “I will tell you what God’s truth is—there are neither slaves nor freemen but all are one in Christ Jesus. And I will tell you something else that is God’s truth—no slaveholder has a place in heaven.”
    The slave hunters’ faces darkened and Lyndel saw their fingers move in and out of the trigger guards of their weapons. She saw the leader’s face twitch between annoyance and anger and rage. Finally he jerked at the door and told his men, “Get our property out of here