The Night Preacher

His blindness had been a curse in the beginning; a young man of eighteen, his eyes burned out with the tip of a hot knife blade. The pain and horror and the sound of his Father's voice, begging the slave master for mercy for his only son. But his Father's pleas had fallen on deaf ears, the slave master making an example of his son as a warning to the other slaves to work faster. Several years later, when the preacher was twenty-one, he had escaped his captors one night, with the help of his Father, who had given his own life to save his only son, the sound of his Father's screams as he was tortured echoing in the preacher's ears as he hid in the forest nearby, helpless to do anything about it. Then, blessed silence. His blindness had been a curse at first, but not anymore. What he'd thought of as a curse and a deformity had proven to be an assest as well, as his other major senses - the senses of smell and hearing - had become so acute. He could hear a bug landing on a leaf, the slow, almost silent slither of a snake in the weeds. He could smell the body odor of another human being from yards away, or their breath as they exhaled. He used these senses primarily at night, as he wandered, looking for the man who had killed his father....