Seeing Rev. Jackdaw head for the shed, the tails of his black coat spreading and flapping behind him like a hawk with crippled wings, Bridget ran. Her arms and legs pumped and her lungs heaved with the effort. She raced through the trees, stopping at Old Mag to drop both palms on the trunk and suck in air. I shouldn’t run. She wasn’t big enough to pull off Rev. Jackdaw, and she wasn’t brave as Nera. Ashamed, she ran on.
She reached Chief ’s fence, squeezed between two strings of barbed wire, and ran across his pasture with her side in painful stitches. She’d made another terrible mistake. She should have first grabbed up two pans—as Grandma Teegan told her to do with Rowan—and banged them the whole way.
Going over the gate into the barnyard, she screamed for Chief. He wasn’t in his yard
