The Holy Warrior Read Online Free PDF Page B

he had no business drinking at all. The two months the brothers had spent with the Greenes had been good for Knox, but Chris had mended hardly at all. The fever that had nearly killed him kept coming back, and despite the good home cooking, he could not eat as he should. Better to say, he would not, for as soon as he was able to get about, he had taken to visiting the tavern on the south edge of town. It was a rough place, little more than a large shed with a dirt floor and only one small window. Knox had gone with him—reluctantly, at first. “Chris,” he had protested, “this is a putrid place! Looks like every no-account in Kentucky comes here to get drunk and raise the Devil!”
    “My kind of place,” Chris had muttered. “You get out of here, Knox. I don’t want to drag you down.”
    Knox had been determined to get Chris off whiskey; unfortunately, it didn’t work that way. Knox had not been a drinking man, but the small tankard of ale soon grew to two; and before long he was reeling as drunkenly as his brother when they made their way home. Knox had vowed time after time to quit, and Chris urged him to stay away. But somehow, Knox always went back.
    Now he was sick and miserable. “Chris is going to kill himself one day, with all this drinking.”
    “I think that’s what he’s got on his mind. Seen a few like that, just so miserable and unhappy they don’t want to go on.” Greene turned to face Knox, and there was pain in his brown eyes as he added, “The thing that scares me is—sooner or later Christmas is going to realize that it’s a lot easier to put a gun to his head than to kill himself by slow degrees drinking whiskey.”
    “He wouldn’t do that!”
    “Why wouldn’t he, Knox? What’s he got to live for?” Greene started to say something else, but at that moment Caroline, his sixteen-year-old daughter, came to the door.
    “Breakfast is ready.” She was a slight girl, not over five four, and her thin face was usually sober. She was not a beauty, but there was a quiet dignity in her face that would have been attractive if she had not chosen to wear her brown hair pulled back in an ugly roll. She wore dark and shapeless dresses, with little or no ornamentation; Knox guessed that was her idea of what a Christian girl should look like. She never missed a service, and after the first time she had tried to talk to Knox about his spiritual condition, he had shied away from her.
    Missy was a different sort, as full of life and color as her older sister was deficient in those qualities. Knox smiled despite his splitting headache as the long legs of the girl came down the ladder that led to the loft. As usual, her soft voice dominated the small house. From the time she got up to the time she went to bed, she was either talking, singing or laughing. He had been shocked the first time he had heard her humming some tunes that he knew had bawdy lyrics—drinking songs, actually. Missy was blissfully unaware of what she was doing, for like a mocking bird she merely copied whatever she heard.
    “Come on, Christmas!” She always called him that instead of “Mr. Winslow” or “Chris,” and she was laughing as she jumped from the rung of the ladder to the floor. She reached up to pull at the feet of the man who was carefully and painfully creeping down after her. “Hurry up, now! I helped Mama make you some corn hoecakes and battered eggs for breakfast—come on!”
    Knox smiled at the sight of Missy’s blond head bobbing as she pulled the man toward the rough board table that took up most of the room in the parlor. The child was the brightest thing he’d ever seen, already reading books that would have given a much older child problems, and was in the center of every activity in the house. She had made a bigtoy out of Christmas, bringing him his meals and fussing at his bad manners. She was the one thing that would bring a smile to the face of the sick man. Once she had said in the midst of her