The Hex Witch of Seldom (6 page)

Thursday evening, as she was lugging her third bucket of water into the corral, eyes down and fixed on the ground, a pair of dandy-small black hooves invaded her view, and the straight, slim black legs above them, and a broad expanse of chest. Standing square and still as if for a showdown, Shane put himself in her way.

Bobbi set down her bucket and made her eyes scan slowly upward, up the arrogant arch of the neck to the high head and the gunfighter-hard eyes looking down on her. Shane stood close enough for her to touch, if she had wanted to, which she did not.

“What do you want?” she asked him.

Travis, coming into the corral right behind her, shut the gate and set his bucket down by hers. He did not know much about horses, but he knew better than to try to walk through one that looked like Shane.

“What do you want?” Bobbi asked again as the stallion made no move. Her inner misery gave her voice a peevish tone. She was seeing the form behind the form again, an unnatural, watery thickening in the air above the horse's withers, and because Travis was there, pride would not let her turn away. She saw—a dim silhouette only, but still clearly enough to make her spine chill, she saw the man's head and the wide brim of his hat, and his broad shoulders, his hands resting on his hips, his long legs set in a defiant stance, and his booted feet, standing where the horse's front hooves stood. She blinked, but the man-form would not go away.

Shane was forcing her to see him again in the way she had not wanted to see him, as a being with thoughts and will, as a—no. She would not say it. She would not see it. Angrily she jerked her eyes away from the weird manifestation in the air and in the horse itself. She made herself meet Shane's blue-eyed stare, and she burst out at him, “I offered to take that halter and lead rope off you, you just remember that! Now it's too late. I'm not allowed.”

Shane did not move, but the form behind his horse form faded into air. Bobbi stood woodenly, badly shaken, and beside her, Travis laughed his low, nervous laugh. He had seen nothing strange except Bobbi's behavior. “You talk to that horse like he was people,” he said.

Of all things, that was the one Bobbi didn't want to hear. She turned on Travis. “You shut up! What do you know about it?”

Travis kept his grin, but it twitched. A hurt look narrowed his eyes. Bobbi did not care; she was hurting too much herself to care if she hurt anyone else. But Shane did an odd thing. He reached out with his proud head and tapped Travis on the shoulder. It was not a nose-nudge but a strange gesture Bobbi could not name, a light blow with the bony ridge, wild and friendly and challenging all at once. It was like an athlete's slap or a knight's accolade. Travis's eyes widened, though he did not seem afraid.

“What did he do that for?” he asked Bobbi.

“I don't know,” she told him. Then, because fair was fair, she added, “That's the first time he's come up to anybody and touched them.”

Travis's face had turned smooth and quiet, the tight, nervous lines gone. “He likes me?”

“Not exactly,” said Bobbi, but without nastiness. She felt sorry she had snapped at Travis, but mostly she felt tired, and Shane was still in her way. “Move, please,” she requested, and the black horse stepped aside at once and let her carry the water to the trough.

The rest of the week, as he helped carry water and spread hay, Travis watched Bobbi and Shane with quiet, wondering eyes. Sunday he didn't come. His parents, passing through on a Sunday walk, told the Yandros he had the flu.

Sunday night, as darkness was falling, Bobbi went out through the corral to the barn. She walked into the aisle between stalls, blacker than night, and did not turn on a light. She opened her horse's stall. “Shane,” she called, her voice only a little shaky, “come here, please.”

He came, but slowly. Something in her voice made him hesitate. But a man of honor had to obey the wishes of a lady, even a lady he detested. He came.

“I have to ask you to go into the stall, please.”

The stall was clean enough that she could have slept it in herself; she had seen to that. There was a bucket of fresh water hanging on the wall, and hay piled in the corner. Not that she expected these things to make any difference to Shane. But they made some small difference to her.

He went into his prison. He had to, because she asked it of him. All she could see of him was a glimmer of yellow lead rope, dragging in the dirt like a felon's chains. All he could see of her was a dark, slim shape in the night.

She closed the stall and latched the door firmly, and imagined that she saw his head lift with uneasy surprise.

“I have to,” she told him, not trying any longer to keep the tremor out of her voice. “I can't go against Pap. I got to live with him, and he's—he's all—he's the only one—”

All the family she had. The only one who—loved her?

She could not feel love anywhere in the night.

She left Shane in the stall and went into the cabin. Her grandfather was sitting in front of the TV and did not look up as she passed him on her way to her room.

Bobbi could not sleep. Early the next morning, Monday morning, she did her chores and left for school without speaking to her grandfather. But he saw her walking down the lane toward the bus stop and called her back.

He looked hard at her, and she met his stare without expression. He wanted to say something to help, somehow, but it came out sounding as hard as his stone-colored stare.

“Time you get home,” he told her, “it'll be done. Now, don't fuss no more. Pay attention to your teachers.”

Bobbi nodded and left.

Three-quarters of the way down the lane she met the vet's truck rattling up. Doc Boser waved at her. She waved back, turned and watched him drive out of sight up Canadawa Mountain.

Then she stepped off the lane into the woods, left her schoolbooks and started back up the slope toward home, at a run. She had no plan. In fact, she was trying not to think. There was a knotted feeling in her chest that she did not want to name. She told herself that she was going to watch and see for herself what gelding was like. Then she would know what—what had been done to—

Shane's image shadowed her mind, black, no matter how she tried to send it away. She ran as if wildcats were after her. Like a deer she crashed through briars and underbrush. When she saw the maroon siding of the barn through the trees and slowed down to be more quiet, her heart would not quit pounding. She felt half panicked. Skipping school to watch something on the sly, a small rebellion, should not have made her feel so scared.… She quelled the thought. She did not dare think.

The big door at her end of the barn, the end away from the corral, hung open. Bobbi slipped out of the woods, edged along the barn wall, and risked a peek inside. Shane.… The black horse had not yet been touched. Relief washed over her, a feeling as dangerous as a thought; she sent it away, trying merely to see what was happening in front of her. Doc and Pap in the barn, working on the sorrel.

Take the easiest horse first was the horseman's rule, whatever needed to be done. The horse that was likely to give trouble always waited until last; otherwise, his struggling would upset the others and cause them to give trouble as well. Since the sorrel was halter-trained, Pap and Doc were gelding him first. In a way hidden even from herself, Bobbi had been counting on that.

She eased her eye past the door frame and watched. Both men were busy, and neither of them saw her. Grant Yandro was just taking the twitch, a sort of metal clamp, off the sorrel's nose after using it to make the horse hold still while the vet injected the sedative into the neck. The sorrel's head sagged; Bobbi could see it through the stall door. Doc had unbundled his instruments. They lay on a white cloth on the stall ledge. Bobbi watched as the vet selected a scalpel and disappeared into the stall. Most vets laid horses on their sides to castrate them, but Doc Boser preferred to do them standing up. Pap steadied the sorrel by the halter—the horse was standing on tottering legs, nearly falling, much too weak and shaky to struggle. Its head drooped nearly to Grand-pap's knees.

The sorrel groaned.

Deep, heaved up from the inmost depths of the horse's helpless pain, the groan trembled through the stable. Bobbi felt her fists curl. The knot in her chest turned into something that stung like smoke, burned like flame. The sorrel groaned as if it were giving up its soul. Something round and bloody, tossed out of the stall, landed in the dirt of the barn aisle. A cluster of stable cats gathered around it.

Deliberately Bobbi shifted her stare and looked at Shane in his stall at the other end of the barn, the corral end.

The door there stood open wide, like the one she stood at, for light. Bobbi could see the black mustang plainly, and she saw how sweat slicked his black hide, how the whites showed around the blue of his eyes, and she knew Shane's fear was not horse fear, made up of blood smell and strangeness, but man fear, because he comprehended what was happening and knew his turn was next. Shane, the outlaw hero who had hardly ever been afraid of anything … Bobbi saw his head turn as he scanned the stall walls, roof, floor, looking for escape. There was none. She saw him thinking, trying to plan where there was no hope. She saw the thinking and the hopelessness along with the fear in his eyes. She knew that, when they came to castrate him, she would see the form beyond his horse form, the man.

The second round, bloody morsel landed in the barn aisle for the cats to gnaw and drag about and pat with delicate paws. Doc Boser reached for his emasculators, a shiny, foot-long pair of tongs to crush what was left inside the sorrel.

And in her mind Bobbi felt an angry, fiery crackling, a snap or click as if something had either broken or slipped into place. She found that she could think again. All right, she thought, I'll be crazy.

She slipped away from the door and around the outside of the barn, quickly, quietly. She ducked through the bars of the corral, eased over to the barn door at the corral end and looked. Pap and the vet, still in the stall with the sorrel. Good. In three soft steps she was at the door of Shane's stall. Blue eyes turned on her and blazed in sudden hope.

“Run like hell,” she whispered to the horse, and she opened the stall.

Shane ran. He was a swashbuckler slashing his way across a hostile courtyard; he was a tavern brawler; he was Han Solo against the storm troopers. He moved like a black thunderbolt. Grant Yandro shouted and started out into the aisleway the moment he heard the snick of the stall latch, but the black horse knocked him aside with one mighty shoulder. Before Pap could raise a hand, Shane was past him and gone, out the far door to freedom, and Bobbi was jumping up and down and yelling after him, “Run, Shane! Keep going! Don't stop till you get to Wyoming!”

And then her grandfather was standing in front of her, and the way he looked at her stopped her shouting. She could almost hear the storm wind rising in his mind, could almost see the bruise-black cloud growing, a thunderhead swelling atop a mountain of pure jagged granite. Bobbi had just sent Grant Yandro beyond mere anger into a state more like what the preachers called wrath.

He did not roar out any of the usual things: what the hun did Bobbi think she was doing, why wasn't she at school, what sort of idiot was she. He did not roar at all. Maybe because Doc Boser was there he did not feel he could shout. So what happened was worse. He spoke in a low voice, stone-cold and hard and hateful.

“Bobbi Lee Yandro,” he said, “you had no right to do that.”

She tried to argue. “He's my horse! I guess I can set him free if I want to.” Though her voice choked on the words.

“I'm the one who signed the papers for him. The federal government says he's their horse for a year yet, and I have to let them know if he gets killed or gets away. I'm the one the Bureau of Land Management is going to come after.”

Bobbi stood stricken. She couldn't speak. What had seemed right was crazy, which made it dead wrong, every other way you looked at it.

Her grandfather said in the same cold rage, “Now you get out of this barn. You go find that black son of a bitch and I don't want to see your face until you bring him back here.”

Bobbi stared at him, feeling the loveless words sear their way into her brain as if they were branded there.

Pap said, “You don't find him, don't bother coming back.”

She turned and walked out of the barn, off the farm and away from the place she called home.

Chapter Five

“Well, then,” Bobbi muttered, because she was a Yandro and had a Yandro's pride, “I won't be back.”

Since her head and heart were out of their whirling confusion and working together again, she knew several things very clearly. She knew gut-deep that Shane must not be castrated, and therefore she knew that she could not take him back to Pap. Her grandfather had no more give in him than a rock, experience told her. Shane had to get away. If someone took him back to Pap again, he would be gelded, sure as a dog gets fleas.

Her grandpap had told her not to come back without the horse. Well, then, she wouldn't come back.

Cleanly, calmly, as she ran, her mind started working on her own survival. She would need food. She would need a means of traveling, and she would need someplace to go.

First, though, there was one last matter to be attended to, if Shane was to get away for good. She had to find the black horse and speak to him once more, just the once, asking him to let her take the halter and lead rope off him. There had been no time, back in the barn. But the dangling lead would make Shane vulnerable to anyone who got near him. What was worse, the lead and halter could catch in the trees or rocks of the rough mountain terrain. Shane could starve to death.

She wouldn't let the thought panic her, not yet. But it had sent her running for all she was worth up the lane, upmountain, because Shane had gone that way.