To Win Her Heart Read Online Free PDF

and discarded horseshoes. The Lord had truly blessed him. With the twenty dollars paid to him by the state after his release, plus the sixty-five cents a day he’d earned breaking granite at the labor camp for eighteen months, he’d come to town with a little over three hundred dollars to his name. And he’d spent a good chunk of that paying for the first two months’ rent in advance that morning at the bank. All he owned were the clothes on his back, a spare shirt, and the Bible the chaplain had given him. He would have never been able to afford to stock the smithy on his own.
    A mouse skittered across Levi’s path, darting away from the sunlight. More scratching sounds echoed in the back corners. The place smelled of dust and disuse, but there was a familiarity, too. Charcoal, leather, and iron. The smells of his father.
    Levi ran his hand over the cold anvil, moving from the squared heel, down across the chipping block, and out to the pointed end of the horn. He could hear the pounding of the sledge, see sparks shower from red-hot iron, hear his father call for him to pump the bellows or hand him a twisting bar while his brother acted as the striker. The smithy had been a place of tradition and pride for the Grant men. Until Levi’s rebellion. Maybe today would be the first step in reclaiming the family honor he’d lost.
    Barnes stepped into Levi’s line of sight and pointed to a large dark circle in the middle of the plank floor. “The smith afore you took to drinking,” he said. “Dropped a hot coal into his kindlin’ bucket one day and tried to put out the flames with the contents of his whiskey bottle.” Barnes looked up and gave Levi a grave look. “Didn’t work too good.”
    Levi shuddered. “He dead?”
    “Naw. Got a few new scars to impress the ladies with is all. Gave ’im a good scare, though. Decided to skip out the next day. I hear tell he’s got a pig farm over in Williamson County now.”
    “Huh.” What else could he say to a story like that?
    “Ain’t a drinkin’ man, are ya?” Barnes scratched at his whiskers, shooting him a glance from the corner of his eye.
    “No.”
    Not for the last two years, anyway. Levi had practically lived in saloons and barrooms prior to that. Not so much for the liquor—mostly for the fights. But that was his old way of life. He’d not return to that path. The Lord had given him a second chance. He didn’t aim to squander it.
    “Good. Then I’ll leave the key with you.” Barnes tossed it to him, and Levi snagged it out of the air. “You got a place to bed down?”
    “I . . . ah . . .” Stayed? Slept? Levi cleared his throat. “Colby . . . put me up at the hotel. But I’ll need to find . . . a room . . . of my own before long.”
    “Well, it ain’t nothin’ fancy, but the wife and I got a shed out back o’ our place with a bunk and a stove. You could come and go as you please, no one to bother ya. Oh, and you’d be welcome to take your meals with us. Georgia would insist on it. That woman don’t believe in lettin’ a man fend for himself in the kitchen.” Barnes winked at him and patted the slightly rounded midsection on his otherwise wiry frame. “Not that I’m complain’, mind you.”
    Levi grinned, warming to the old man. He couldn’t recall the last time someone had approached him with genuine hospitality. The preacher and his wife had been kind, but there was something about Claude Barnes that put Levi at ease. Made him feel accepted. Normal.
    ’Course, that was probably because the man thought him a blacksmith, not a convicted felon. Guilt jabbed him in the belly.
    “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
    The verse from 2 Corinthians he had spent days meditating on before his release rose from his memory to beat back the shame and unworthiness that twined like fast-growing jungle vines around his soul.
    He was a blacksmith.