The Hex Witch of Seldom Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bobbi. Shane gave it a scornful look, then walked to the strewn hay and began methodically to eat. Bobbi leaned her arms on a fence rail and watched. Not because she wanted to touch him—or so she told herself, for Bobbi scorned to feel desire for boys or men—but because she wanted to be a friend to him, Bobbi said, “If you would care to come here, I’ll take that stupid halter off.”
    Without raising his head from the hay, Shane narrowed his eyes and gave her a chilling look.
    â€œWell, just remember I offered,” Bobbi complained. She laid her chin down on her folded arms and watched the black stud eat while the sorrel cowered against the opposite fence. After a while she said, very softly, so softly that probably Shane didn’t hear, “I’d like to groom that mud and fur off you, too, and make you shine. Maybe being dirty is what’s making you so sour. Seems to me you would have been a dandy. Gold rings, silk cravats—”
    â€œWho you talking to?”
    Bobbi jumped, then sighed with exasperation. Travis Dodd, the neighbor boy from up the mountain, had come up beside her without her hearing him. She hated that. She hated the way his eyelids jumped. She hoped he hadn’t heard too much. If he had, he didn’t show it; nervous as always, he blundered on without waiting for an answer.
    â€œThem the mustangs? Which one’s yours?”
    â€œBlack,” Bobbi replied curtly.
    â€œOh.” Travis stared intently at the horse. Travis had hair the off-color of homemade soap and a twitchy grin, and he didn’t know a thing about horses. “He’s nice, I guess,” he said lamely of the black.
    Bobbi wished he would go away and let her alone with the horse that was no horse and with her crazy thoughts. She didn’t understand why Travis hung around her the way he did, when she wasn’t interested in boys the way most girls her age were. They all seemed so—so futile, compared to her dreams. How could she ever love any pimply boy the way she loved the images in her own mind?
    Moreover, she was not the sort of girl boys were supposed to hang around. Something in her rebelled against making herself attractive, or what other people called attractive. She didn’t bother with makeup, and she got her clothes off the boys’ rack at the Goodwill store. Her excuse was that Pap didn’t have much money, but in fact it was all part of her Yandro orneriness. Yandros were independent, Grandpap said, and didn’t care about fashion or what people thought, and Bobbi was a Yandro.
    â€œAin’t you coming to school today?” Travis pestered. “Don’t you think one unexcused absence is enough for this week?”
    â€œCrud,” Bobbi muttered. She had forgotten all about school. The day felt like weekend to her since she had taken off school to go to the mustang place, but it was just Friday.
    â€œGet your stuff,” said Travis. “I’ll wait.”
    He would walk with her down the long lane to the school bus stop, he meant. Bobbi found his attentions annoying and faintly embarrassing. She went back into the cabin and, after brushing her teeth, slipped out the back door and walked to the bus stop through the woods to avoid Travis with his puke-blond hair and shy, staring eyes.
    She was glad to avoid Pap too. Her grandfather had gone off somewhere, and she did not see him at all that morning.
    When she got home in the late afternoon, Grandpap was in the corral with the mustangs. By the look of his reddened face, for once he had lost his patience while working with a horse.
    â€œBobbi!” he roared as soon as she came in view up the lane. “This black devil has got to go!”
    Bobbi dropped her books and came running, but grew angry as she ran. “He’s my horse,” she said as she pounded up to the fence. “You don’t have to mess with him.”
    â€œI’m just trying to get to my own