Shadow Walker

Chapter 1

The house is a large rustic house of about seventy-five years old.   The house sits on a hill over looking a pasture that ends at the banks of the Sabine River, which runs swift and deep this time of year.  The river has an under current and fisherman are careful.  Legend has it, that the river divided two Indian nations years ago.   Now the river runs into Lake Tawakoni,  a man made lake that was finished in nineteen hundred and sixty-one.   Lake Tawakoni  is also known as Iron Bridge Reservoir.  The lake did not exist when the Indians and buffaloes freely roamed the land.  As for the house,  it has large rooms with a large hallway down the middle.  A family of five now live in the big roomy house.  The walls of the living room and the hallway are painted in light blue.  The kitchen and the dinning room are painted in sunny yellow.  In the far right corner of the living room, away from the door, there is an old Franklin stove.   A large over stuffed tan couch sets to the left as you enter the room.   A tan  easy chair to the right with a dark brown small round table setting next to the chair.  In the fare left hand corner there is a old large rocking chair.  Curled  up in the rocking  chair, reading a book  is a young girl of  eighteen.  She raised her brown eyes and scanned the room and there was no one else in the room, besides herself.  She had been so transfixed on the book that she did  not hear her father leave the room.  She closed her book and laid it down in her lap.  She looked at looked at the smoldering fire in the fireplace. 

She got up holding her  book with her left hand and pushing back her long sandy  blond curls with her right hand.  She moved  to  the small table that is to the right of the easy chair and deposited her book on it.  She  moved back to the  fire place and squatted  down in front of it.  She reached to her right for the poker and proceeded to poke at the fire that was about to go out.   She sat back on her heels and watched the sparks flying everywhere. She grumbled to herself.  “No one in this whole house knows how to keep a fire going but me.  They expect me to do everything around here.”   She had not heard her father walk in about that time and she did not realize that she had spoken  aloud.  She was too engrossed in the fire and her own thoughts.

“ What did you say Blondy?”

Sissie jumped because she thought she was alone in the room.  She looked up at her father who was coming into the room.  She shook her head while getting up and said,  “Nothing  Daddy.  I was just going to get some firewood off the back porch.”  She glided out of the living room door and made left turn, then down the hall to the back porch. She stopped just before opening the back screen door and looked  back down the large hallway to the front door.  The hallway went down the middle of the house.  She liked the roomy hallway.  The hallway is six feet wide and it is the length of the house.  The living quarters are on one side and the sleeping quaters are on the other side.  She and her older brother Jeff used to play cowboys and indians in it when they were younger.  She shook her head to clear her thoughts, and then she exited through the screendoor.   As she closed the  screen door she turned around to get the firewood.  The firewood is to the left on the back porch.  She bent down and started picking the firewood up with her right  hand, and placing it on her left arm.  She was so busy with her chore, that she didn’t hear her older brother, Jeff walk up.

“What you doing Sis?”

Sissie looked up from her wood gathering and smiled at her brother.  “Oh, just getting some firewood in, silly.   What does it look like I’m doing? “  She wrinkled her nose up at her brother and then grinned at him.

Jeff watched his sister as she was getting up and then he came on up on the porch.  “Kind of warm for a fire, right now isn’t it?  He asked as he opened th