Page 55 of Tormented Hearts

“Or died here.” A shiver ran through her as if they’d stirred up ghosts along with dust.

He squeezed her arm. “I’m no historian, but this place is old. If I had to guess, it fits the time of the cabin from the Legend of Three Prospectors.”

She glanced around. “Or it could just be an abandoned shack rotting in the mountains.”

“We need to look for proof. Names carved in the logs. Anything personal left behind.”

She nodded and set off to a corner, and he started in the opposite corner. There wasn’t much to the place. A simple wood table. A single dug-out stump drawn up to it for a stool. The far corner had a pile of fabric that might have once been a mattress. He moved to it first and used his phone flashlight to cut through the shadows.

He was aware of Sinead’s footsteps behind him and drew comfort from the sound as they both searched the place.

His flashlight panned over the old striped cloth, chewed by rodents and moths, and settled on a dark piece of leather.

He reached for the object and grunted as he lifted an old leather bag, cracked and stiff with age.

His pulse kicked up a notch. There were initials burned into the leather flap.

In awe, he ran his thumb over the lettering, still legible despite the decades in the cabin: EW.

This was it. He was sure of it. He felt it in his bones.

This was the cabin from the legend.

He spun toward Sinead. She stood across the room in what passed for a kitchen—a rough plank counter and a rusted potbelly stove crumbling into ruin. On the counter sat several burlap sacks sagging with rot.

She was working through them one by one. He watched her inspect one carefully and then toss it aside after a single peek inside. As it hit the counter, white powder spilled out—old food turned to dust and crawling with bugs that she clearly wanted no part of.

“Sinead—”

She cut him off with a sharp breath as she looked into the second bag. “Hawk!”

He closed the gap between them in three strides, boots kicking up dust. When she drew out the object, the light from the open door hit it, revealing something small and square.

A leatherbound book, its cover cracked with age.

He crowded close to her, holding up his phone to shed light on the pages. She was breathing fast, and her eyes were wide on his for a beat.

“Open it,” he urged her.

There was handwriting on the first page, a careful, looping script in ink faded to brown but still readable after all this time.

“It’s a journal.” Her voice wavered. “This is—Hawk, this was his. My great-great-grandfather’s.” She ran her finger beneath the name. “Eli Winthrop.” Her voice broke.

Hawk stared at the page over her shoulder, reverence a weight in his chest.

They were holding actual history in their hands. Not a legend. Not a story passed down and exaggerated over a hundred fifty years around campfires and dinner tables. But a real man’s words—written in this exact room.

He held up the bag in his hand. “Look. This has his initials.”

She issued a gasp and reached for the strap. He let her take the bag, and she leaned close to examine the initials EW.

“Hawk…” Her eyes were bright, and they didn’t say anything for a second as they processed what they’d discovered among the dust.

Sinead moved to the stump and sank to it, setting the items on the table.

While she took a moment with her ancestor’s belongings, Hawk kept searching the cabin.

He needed proof this wasn’t just a family homestead but the cabin. The one from the legend.