Through the Deep Waters Read Online Free PDF

as much as you can from it.” She reached out as if to pat Dinah’s knee, but Dinah jerked away. Miss Flo sighed again and rose. “I’ll go hurry them up with that tub. Just wait there.” She left the room.
    Naked and so sore it hurt to breathe, Dinah had no choice but to wait. One of Miss Flo’s comments returned to haunt her. “There’s only one first time.” She found no reassurance—if it were even true—that it would never hurt like this again, but it mattered little compared to the realization now collapsing her heart.
    Her entire life she’d envied the children who went home to a mother and father, who fought and shared and played with brothers and sisters. She’d dreamed of the day she would grow up, marry, have children, and be part of such a family herself. Why hadn’t she stopped to think about the future, being courted, giving herself to her husband on her marriage bed?
    “There’s only one first time.” She had just sacrificed something she could never get back. No decent man would want her now.

Florence, Kansas
    Amos
    Amos Ackerman ducked beneath the straggling branches of the scrub oak growing next to the chicken yard and shook his head at the Leghorn hen sitting as pretty as a queen on her throne on a low branch. “What is it you’re doing up there?”
    The chicken tipped its head and blinked one round black eye.
    “All the nice roosting boxes I built for you and your friends, and you think you need to sit in a tree?”
    It clucked as if defending itself.
    Amos laughed. “Is that so, huh? Well, I don’t think I believe a word of it.” He lifted the chicken from its roosting spot, ignoring its indignant cluck-cluck-cluck and wing flapping, and placed it gently on the ground. “Go on now. Keep your feet on the ground where they belong.” The chicken joined the other feathered fowl pecking in the yard, and Amos chuckled at its continued complaining squawk.
    He stood for a moment beneath the tree’s skinny branches and observed his flock. Four dozen in all—snowy Leghorns with rosy combs that flopped to the side as if too lazy to stand upright. They were sassy birds, chattering to one another as they foraged among the clumps of grass for tasty morsels. Pride filled his chest. Would he ever have imagined owning such a fine bunch of chickens? No, never. But Ma always said God gifted His children beyond their deserving, and Amos Ackerman’s chicken farm proved it.
    A prayer left his heart, his talking to God as instinctive as breathing. Thank You, my dear Lord and Savior, for my home and the means of providing for myself .
    Bending forward to avoid catching his hat on the tree’s prickly branches, he moved into the sunshine. The mid-July sun burned hot overhead, and he hurried across the yard to the barn where its deep shadows would offer a cool respite. He’d learned to swing his good leg twice as far as the bad one to make up for his stiff hip, giving him an awkward but effective gait.
    The Leghorns had scattered from him in nervousness the first time he moved among them, but over their weeks together they’d grown accustomed to his hitching means of walking and now pecked, unconcerned and trusting, around his feet. He had lots of reasons to like the birds—their willingness to forage for food, their easy acceptance of the roosting house, their consistent delivery of eggs each day that would let him make a decent living—but he liked them most because they didn’t shy away from him.
    He reached the barn, and two curious hens darted ahead of him to poke their beaks against the dark earth floor. He stepped past them and made his way to the straw-lined wagon where he’d placed the morning’s eggs in with the previous two days’ bounty. Admiring the washed, smooth orbs, he smiled. Twelve-dozen eggs in three days’ worth of laying. When the salesman in Hutchinson had told him the birds would each lay an egg up to 360 days a year, Amos had been skeptical. Almost an egg a day? But so