Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold Read Online Free

at Anne. “You better be thinking of a good story for your daddy, honey. He got more exercised with every mile we rode even before Browers started us looking here. We snuck up on this place like we were the Injuns. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes right now.” He raked his eyes over her with deliberate insult, then laughed. “Or out of them.”
    He seized her by the upper arm, roughly pushing her toward the open door. Anne dropped her shoes to fight him, but then heard her father’s voice rising over the confusion of sounds in the yard.
    “You half-breed bastard, what have you done to my daughter? She’s here. Those are her footprints!”
    Anne stopped resisting and let her captor push her outside. Later she would realize that there were only ten men and horses in the yard, but right then it seemed like a hundred, all milling and churning around. Besides her father, she immediately picked out George Detrick. The rest of the men must have volunteered when her father looked for a search party to help find her. Three of them had guns drawn, all aimed at Cord.
    She barely recognized the man standing face to face with Cord. The very erect military bearing was her father’s, as was the dark hair only touched with gray. But Edward’s face was mottled red with rage, and under his precisely trimmed mustache, his mouth was a thin, twisted line.
    More frightened than ever by the sight, Anne ran to her father, reaching for his arm, crying, “No, don’t.”
    Edward rounded on her, grabbing her by the upper arms and shaking her like a rag doll.
    “Did you think you’d get away with it? Did you think nobody saw you get in Browers’ wagon? I thought we had to save you from them, but this is worse! You fool, you couldn’t obey me and marry a respectable man, you had to run off and get yourself ruined by Bennett trash!”
    He was shouting, spitting a fine spray of saliva. “Anyone can tell what’s been going on here. Either he forced you or you were willing. Say he forced you!”
    Defying her father further in front of all these other men would be the worst thing she could do - except for telling the lie he demanded. When he stopped shaking her, she said very carefully, loudly, and distinctly, so that everyone would hear, not just her father, “He never touched me.”
    She expected disbelief and more anger, but never the full-strength backhanded blow that smashed into the side of her face. Stunned, she staggered back against a porch post, the only thing that kept her from falling. Her mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood. She had never been hit before.
    All Anne could see was her father and his anger, but she heard Cord’s words clearly enough.
    “Leave her alone, damn you. She didn’t….
    The sound that stopped his words wasn’t the crack of flesh on flesh, but a dull thud. A gun barrel Anne thought.
    Her father again seized her by the upper arms. “Say he forced you!”
    This time Anne was ready for his reaction as she again carefully enunciated, “He never tou…,” but that was as far as she got before the second blow exploded on the other side of her face. She didn’t fall because someone had come up behind her and was holding her upright.
    “I didn’t come along to watch anybody beat a woman.”
    Anne managed to bring things back into focus, and saw Dick Brown, a farmer who lived near Turrells, mount his horse and ride away. Then Cord snaked into motion, using the diversion to dive under the guns, taking the man on his left down with him, kicking the feet out from under another. There were simply too many of them, and a fight wasn’t what they had in mind. A shot rang out, and when Cord got slowly to his feet, blood soaked his shirt on one side just above his belt.
    Violence charged the air as palpably as the electricity of the storm had the night before. Anne was afraid to look at Cord, couldn’t bear that she had brought this horror down on him. George Detrick broke the ominous silence, making