The Hex Witch of Seldom by Nancy Springer Page A

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.
    â€œRun 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.
    â€œBobbi 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.
    â€œI’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
    â€œWell, 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