Free Canyon Song by Gwyneth Atlee Page A

red-haired uncle’s grin as he’d shared that line, along with so many of Shakespeare’s finest . His Uncle Ferris, a bright, self-educated immigrant, had dreamed of being a great actor, but his Irish brogue consigned him to the brutal life of a day laborer. When he could find work at all, that is. When he could talk his way past the hand-scrawled signs, “No Irish Need Apply.”
    Still, Ferris’s smile had lit the shared family apartment . His dream might not have been his future, but it somehow sustained him even more than the few coins he’d brought home.
    Quinn knew his uncle had fought to the last gasp inside that fiery tenement . He knew that Ferris would want his sister’s son to fight just as hard for his life now.
    Quinn surprised himself with the fierceness of his desire to comply . What was he but a ruined gambler and a failed lawman? Who was he to wish to live? Since his family’s death, he lacked even a dream like his dead uncle’s to sustain him.
    Yet still, he meant to live, if only to find Hamby and his gang and do what he should have years before . For with this shooting, he felt his ties to Cameron severed. He would make damned sure no other child was scalped and left to die, no other lawman back-shot. Not by Ned Hamby’s men, at least, for they would all be dead.
    Strange, how it had been the scalps that sent him flying from his saddle when nothing else in six years had convinced him to care enough to risk bucking Cameron’s orders . He closed his eyes, trying not to see the blood-caked black hair held tight in Hamby’s fist, trying not to see the filthy smoke that marked the burning hogan.
    And then, suddenly, he knew . Though his two younger sisters’ hair had been sandy blond, not black, though the home that burned around them had been a tenement and not the round hut built by the Navajo, that child’s dying whimpers had merged the two events inside his mind. Perhaps because, as with his mother’s apartment back in New York, his help hadn’t been in time.
    Too late, Annie . Too late because of you , he’d told the thief. But he’d been wrong, or lying, because his own greed had been responsible. He could have gone back long before she’d robbed him, but his fine horse had too well pleased him, as did his flashy clothes and the pretty company his generous gifts could buy. Annie Faith had been the prettiest of all, always ready with a saucy smile to encourage or a song so soulful that it made him long to hold her tight. But she was only one of many beguiling, heartless creatures that waylaid the unwary on the road of sin.
    If Annie hadn’t robbed or shot him, someone else would have, for he’d grown greedy, cheating more and more boldly, cutting corners in his grasping desperation to accumulate more money . He didn’t want to just go back to help his family. He’d wanted to return a dapper hero, and in the end that vain desire had cost him everything.
    He would never forgive himself for that, no more than he would forgive the woman who had robbed him, even though he knew that with her herbs and unguents, Annie Faith had saved his life.
    *     *     *
    When Canto sidestepped nervously, Anna wondered if he too sensed something, or if his restlessness was only her apprehension communicating itself to the old horse . A chill breeze stirred to blow the damp ends of her hair into her face. Another tree nearby shook off a portion of its load of snow.
    Of course . The rain had caused some of the snow to melt and shift. And that cracking in the underbrush? It could have been a loose branch settling, or even her imagination. Thinking about the horrors of the past had made her suspect the present. There was nothing here beyond the possibility of her next meal.
    The gelding quieted, then stretched out his scrawny neck to grab a mouthful of winter grasses . Only a few feet beyond him, a cottontail hung beneath a low limb, a wire snare around its neck.
    Anna dismounted, then stooped to