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    On A Dark & Snowy Night
    On A Dark & Snowy Night
    On A Dark & Snowy Night
    Ebook49 pages32 minutes

    On A Dark & Snowy Night

    By Leanne W. Smith

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    About this ebook

    Hoke Mathews is fifteen, orphaned, and now he’s running scared after having killed a man. Is Hoke a criminal? Will his deed be viewed as murder? Are the authorities on his trail?

    It will take him twenty years to learn the answers as he avoids the town that holds his darkest memories.

    But suddenly, a lig

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLeanne W. Smith
    Release dateDec 14, 2017
    ISBN9780692044926
    On A Dark & Snowy Night
    Author

    Leanne W. Smith

    Leaving Independence is Leanne Wood Smith’s first historical novel. In addition to writing, she teaches for a university in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and a son-in-law. Leanne believes that when something calls to you, you should journey toward it. Visit her website at www.leannewsmith.com for inspiration in pursuing personal and career-related dreams.

    Read more from Leanne W. Smith

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      Book preview

      On A Dark & Snowy Night - Leanne W. Smith

      On A Dark & Snowy Night

      by Leanne W. Smith

      Chapter 1: The Light

      December 1845

      The light from the cabin drew him like the beacon of a lighthouse pulling in a weary sailor. It shone for miles over the rolling land.

      Hoke’s breath came in bursts. Each release of it into the icy wind formed a mist below his dark, brown eyes. The steam hovered, then fled as the next breath advanced, much like Hoke himself had fled before the law could overtake him.

      Was he a criminal now?

      He had to be. He’d killed a man.

      Hoke had watched his father die years before, but it was worse to look down into the empty eyes of a human whose life he’d snuffed out with his own hands—a life he had taken with the life given to him. That man’s breath had come in bursts, too, until his body had stilled.

      The horrible realization had flowed through Hoke’s pumping bloodstream in an instant. I killed a man. I killed a man.

      So he had fled. But the cold, sober reality had followed him.

      The snow had only been a spit when he started running. Then it turned into a blinding white haze that stacked and piled against the trees. By the time the snow stopped falling, he was tromping through a foot-high covering. He moved through it until long after the sun had set. He was falling, stumbling…thinking about lying down and letting the whiteness cover him like an icy death blanket. But then the light blinked at him in the distance.

      The light was out in front of him now, smaller than the moon but brighter, pulling him forward through the knee-deep snow like the hope that keeps a drowning man fighting his way to the surface. Only Hoke wasn’t a man. He could have passed for one if someone saw him floundering through the snow, for he was tall and broad-shouldered, but Hoke was just fifteen. He had tried to act like a man—had wanted to think of himself as a man. But out here running—frightened, alone—he felt sharply aware of his youth.

      A fifteen-year-old boy had no business running scared in the woods on a snowy night. But where else did he have to go? Nowhere. He had nowhere. Belonged nowhere. For five years now he had been bobbing like driftwood, with no family of his own to claim.

      He thought of Ed Branson and Mrs. Ruby. They had provided the closest thing to a harbor he’d known. The news of his deed would hurt them. Hoke could imagine the way it would pierce through the walls of their peaceful home and hearts, and hover over them like a shame cloud.

      The shame was what had sent him running.

      He wanted to justify the killing in his mind. Surely it wasn’t the same as murder. Still, he expected the sheriff from Independence to pursue him. How would the woman, as sole witness, tell the story in town? Hoke suspected she would spare him no grace.

      It wasn’t the threat of being jailed or hanged he couldn’t face. It was the shame his actions were sure to bring on the Bransons. The last thing Hoke had ever wanted to do was cause pain to the couple that had been so good to him—who had let him sleep in their livery, fed him, seen to it that his education didn’t suffer.

      It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents. Those were the first words of the first book Mrs. Ruby ever read to him. Hoke usually remembered the first line of a book. Violent gusts of wind had swept the cold streets of London in that story. Hoke wondered how they compared to the violent gusts of wind

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