The Hex Witch of Seldom Read Online Free PDF Page A

confined space without resisting. All its survival instincts are against it. But mustangs are even more afraid of the humans behind them than they are of the trap.
    The men had loaded what they considered would be the easier horse first, while the black watched and Bobbi watched the black. In those weird blue eyes she saw nothing of a horse’s instincts. Instead, she saw scorn.
    The black mustang’s turn came. Three men on foot approached to drive the horse into the chute.
    The black horse charged.
    The wranglers scrambled for the entry. One of them croaked out a scream. To their way of thinking, a nightmare was happening. Only a vicious horse, a killer horse, will attack. But as Bobbi perceived it, a defiant justice was taking place. The black horse had hurt no one, but merely turned the whip of fear against the men. Through the tall wooden barrier she watched quietly, knowing what would happen.
    The black stud walked deliberately into the loading chute and through it onto the trailer.
    When Bobbi got there, her grandfather had closed the trailer door. He gave her a peculiar look and did not speak to her as he got into the truck cab to drive. The sorrel was kicking at the inside of the trailer. The black stood quietly.
    During the entire three-and-a-half-hour drive home, Pap and Bobbi said hardly a word.
    Grant Yandro eased the trailer up the long, rutted lane leading back through the dark fir woods to the stony-hard mountainside farm, pressed small by forest, where the Yandros lived.
    Bobbi got out and opened the gate of the six-foot pipe corral where the mustangs would have to go, built on the small, tilted patch of ground where the old bank barn had once stood, outside the metal barn Grandpap had put up a few years back. Grandpap backed the trailer flush up to the corral gate. Four placid horses, grazing in the steep, electric-fenced pasture, raised their heads in mild interest and watched the mustangs unload.
    The black came out first, calmly, walking to the center of the corral and looking around at hills like sleeping dinosaurs, the cabin squatting in the shadows, the dark firs and gray sugar maples with their blood-red tinge of springtime bud. The sorrel had to be urged to follow. It had lamed itself with kicking at the unyielding metal of the trailer; it stumbled out and floundered to the fence, looking for escape, its long lead trailing. Mustangs wore halters and lead ropes constantly until they were trained.
    Pap and Bobbi watched the mustangs a moment, then closed the corral and the trailer and went wordlessly about their chores.
    It was a silent, unpleasant evening. On toward dark, when her grandfather had settled sourly in front of the old black-and-white TV, Bobbi slipped out of the cabin. Half-log, half-stone, it had been there since sometime before the Civil War. Bits of old tools and junk lay all around it. Bobbi dodged around a rusting compressor and down the cluttered slope to the corral to see her horse—if the black stud could truly be said to be hers.
    The sorrel scrambled for the far side of the corral when it heard her coming, but the black stood within arm’s reach of the gate, and he stood his ground. The clown-bright nylon halter and lead rope on him glowed like fungi in the dusk.
    â€œI’ll take those off you, if you like,” Bobbi offered from the other side of the gate.
    The black tossed his head in proud negation. He was not ready to accept an offer of help from her or anyone else, this stud. Bobbi felt certain that he had understood every word she said, an absurd, insane certainty, eerie enough to chill her with creeping fear and lower her voice to a hoarse whisper.
    â€œWhat are you?”
    Once again she looked to the horse’s strange eyes for the answer.
    They glowed like blue fire. Within a moment they glazed so bright that to Bobbi they no longer seemed blue, but strobe-white, engulfing her with their flaring light—she could see nothing. Yet, she could