Read Canyon Song for Free Online Page B

indignantly as Anna grasped her scaly legs and lifted her off of her nest . Her wings beat frantically, setting puffs of inky feathers adrift inside the storage shed where she had sheltered.
    Anna frowned . Her last black hen. Were the gambler’s need or her own guilt less pressing, she would spare the chicken’s life.
    One of the señora’s patients might require a black hen later . To those people, the chicken’s customary color would likely matter more.
    If she had some branches of sweet basil or even lemons, she might use them instead . If her bedraggled chickens had not quit laying, she would have some choice.
    The black hen cackled, as if asking Anna for another chance . The chicken’s pleas availed it nothing, but something else sufficed: a brown curve Anna glimpsed beneath the straw.
    Releasing the hen, which clucked furious complaints, she took the half-hidden egg instead . Her stomach growled as the warm shape filled her palm. She would have welcomed an egg to supplement the pinto beans and bacon she had eaten earlier, but instead she focused her attention on the current of el dón that would sweep through her as she sought to heal Quinn Ryan. Curling her fingers around the light brown shell, she imagined it as a spring flowing through a fissure in the stark face of a canyon wall. Life bursting through the cold rock, touching the stream’s edges with the tender greens of new growth.
    She thought again of Quinn, lying still as death inside her cabin . Neither the curing woman’s poultices nor herbs had opened the closed door of his consciousness. Only faith suggested that a simple egg and prayer might be the keys.
    Anna closed the shed door and stepped outside . She shuddered against the deepening cold. Glancing up beyond the canyon’s red walls, she studied the perfect stillness of the junipers’ upper branches, the flat blue-gray of the sky beyond. She smelled snow coming, a frigid moisture that weighed down the odors of evergreens and animals, of dried grasses and cold earth. A bad day for travel, she decided. Maybe she’d been right to stay with Quinn instead of riding to check on the Rodriguez child. Burdened as she was by the injured gambler, she could only offer prayers for the young babe.
    Quinn, too, needed words now even more than herb lore. Sometimes the soul required more attention than the body’s wounds . During her apprenticeship, Anna had seen many people relieved by healing rituals. Their faith helped to restore them because they had been brought up to believe. Yet hadn’t the old woman made her believe as well? Hadn’t Anna been saved by the strange cleansings and whispered prayers every bit as much as herbal treatments?
    In their common log corral, the horse and goats munched noisily on their feed as she walked past them toward the cabin . Perhaps she could pass on the señora’s favor to this man that she had wronged. Perhaps in doing so, she could restore peace to her own troubled soul.
    *     *     *
    “Shit. If there was a white woman within twenty miles a here, we’d a heard tell of it,” Pete growled. He hadn’t stirred out of his bunk all day that Hamby knew of.
    Hamby grabbed the whiskey bottle from Pete’s hand . One thing he could always count on. Pete wasn’t going to leave a warm cabin or a bottle without whining like a babe pulled off the tit. The miner’s shack they’d taken over wasn’t much by anybody’s standards, but this morning, when Ned had stumbled outside to relieve himself and tend to Ginger, the air felt cold and oddly heavy. Rheumatism weather, his mama always called it.
    He wondered how she was faring in the harsh dregs of winter of the Texas Panhandle . The thought set him to worrying, as always. Worrying that his mama wouldn’t be alive when he got back. Worrying almost as much that not even his fine mare and gold watch would be enough to buy him his family’s welcome.
    You always was a no ‘count. Always was and always will be, too .