The RECKONING: A Jess Williams Western Read Online Free PDF Page B

deep rich black soil. He looked up at the sky and the tears streamed down both sides of his head. He stayed that way for almost five minutes, wondering if there was anyone looking down on him right now. He finally got the strength to stand back up and he slowly turned around and walked toward the house. He stopped about two hundred feet from the house, not sure if he could summon the courage to go back in there. Then, all of a sudden, he realized that he had not found his sister Samantha yet.
                  Jess took a few steps toward the house and then stopped as if he had hit an invisible wall. He swallowed hard and wiped the tears from his eyes. He knew he had to look for Samantha and that meant he had to go back into the house, but he couldn’t gather the courage to do it. He decided to go to the back of the house and look in the windows. He walked around to the back of the house and got within two feet of the first window. He leaned his back against the outside wall of the house and tried to gain the courage to look inside.
                  He slowly stepped up to the window of his pa’s room and looked inside. There was no sign of Samantha. He made his way over to the other window and looked inside, but Samantha was not there. He turned toward the barn and stable and he walked over to the barn. The door was already open. He walked into the barn and called out his sister’s name. He looked around and was getting ready to climb the ladder to the top floor when he saw her arm sticking out of a pile of hay. Tears of fear filled his eyes again as he walked toward her. He knelt down and began to clear the hay from Samantha’s body. Her clothes were torn apart. Jess sobbed uncontrollably. She had been beaten to a pulp and shot; a single bullet hole in the middle of her forehead.
                  He picked her up and carried her body out of the barn. As he stepped outside, he stopped for a moment and looked out toward his pa’s body. He went around to the front of the house and up the steps and laid his sister’s body gently down on the porch. Then, he sat down on the steps of the porch, laid his face on his arms, and sobbed for what seemed like an eternity. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He wondered if this was just a bad dream and he would wake up soon. How could anyone do something like this? This just can’t be happening, he thought to himself.
                  He wasn’t sure if he had fallen asleep or was simply still in a daze when he began to hear the beating of hooves on the ground. He lifted his head as Sheriff Diggs quickly reined up his horse in front of the house and dismounted. As soon as Sheriff Diggs hit the ground, he knew things were bad. He already saw Samantha’s body lying motionless on the porch. He ran up the steps of the front porch to get to Samantha’s body to see if there was any chance that she was alive. There wasn’t.
                  “My God, Jess. What in the hell happened here?” asked Sheriff Diggs. Jess tried to mouth the words, but he couldn’t speak. He just sobbed more loudly.
                  “Where is your father, Jess?” asked Sheriff Diggs.
                  Jess lifted his head, tears still streaming from his eyes. He slowly pointed toward the field where he found his pa’s dead body earlier. The sheriff saw the horse with the plow just sitting still out in the middle of the field. He could just barely make out what looked like a body on the ground behind the horse and plow. He began to head down the steps to run out to check where Jess was pointing, but before he got to the bottom step, Jess grabbed the sheriff’s arm and stopped him in his tracks. The sheriff knelt down and put his hand on Jess’s shoulder.
                  “I’ve got to go out there, Jess,” explained Diggs.
                  Jess looked at the sheriff and shook his head as if to say