The Hex Witch of Seldom Read Free Page A

found the old, cloth-covered Webster’s dictionary, and looked up “scrying.” Seeing visions, it meant, in a shiny surface, a mirror or a crystal ball. Then she came back and read again and again the words her father had written, and listened to the way they made her dream.
    She read on. She read of girls Wright Yandro had loved and girls who had scorned him. She read of his feeling alone, different, odd, hidden. Those feelings she understood, but often he wrote of things she did not understand.
    â€œHe goes by many names. I call him Shane.
    â€œHe is the outlaw the people love, the hero dressed in black.
    â€œHe is the desperado who robs banks during the dust-bowl years and gives the money to the dirt farmers. He is the lone gypsy wandering in his wagon across the W.W. II wastelands, who steals from Allies and Nazis alike and crosses borders by night, bringing Jews out of occupied land. He is the river-boat gambler who gets into a fight one night and kills a man, and gives his winnings to an orphanage. He is the master jewel thief who falls in love with a sad-eyed whore and dresses her in diamonds. He is the bandit who is the blood brother of a lawman and goes gunning to avenge his death. He is the gun for hire who gives away his heart to a wisp of a girl and gets himself killed.
    â€œHe is the scoundrel, the daredevil, ‘Wanted’ by the law, loved by those ground under the heel of the law. He is not quite real. Yet he is more real than life. Cold of eye and dark of garb, he joins the Hidden Circle with the others. He is vulnerable, more so than most, because he is great of heart. He is dangerous, more so than most, because he is vulnerable. His enemy is the trickster, who has no heart at all. And the trickster is a gypsy as well, and a thief, and a gambler. But the people, who know, do not love the trickster.
    â€œThey love and protect the dangerous stranger. He goes by many names. I call him Shane.”
    It was as good a name as any. Bobbi shrugged and read on. Her father wrote only once of the staff, only once of scrying, only once of the stranger named Shane. But again and again he wrote of horses, of the mustangs running on the western plains.
    When at last she could not stay awake any longer, she lay back on the bed, still in her shirt and jeans, and went to sleep without even undoing her braid and brushing her dun-colored hair. Images formed behind her closed eyelids, and a snatch of poetry, her dead father’s poetry, hovered in her mind.
    â€œHorses, galloping horses,
    Bay and gray and blood-black horses,
    Bright and shadowy, canter by,
    Pass before my inward eye.
    They are the horses of a dream.
    They are not what they seem.”
    She dreamed that a druid chanted the words to her as she slept. Then she dreamed that her father sat on the edge of the bed and spoke to her, and instructed her.
    â€œYou never told me my father was a poet,” she said to her grandfather the next morning.
    Grant Yandro looked at her over breakfast scrapple, hearing the blame in her voice. But he said only, “News to me.”
    â€œHe had that poem published in the Clarion !”
    The old man’s granite-colored eyes opened slightly in a remembering look. He said, “I’d forgot.”
    He was more likely to remember when each of his boys had shot his first deer, Bobbi knew, or trained his first colt, than to remember a poem sent in to the newspaper. He wasn’t likely to understand about a poem. But if he’d ever read his dead son’s notebooks, he would have known Wright was a poet. She said, “You never read his papers you just gave me.”
    Grant Yandro said, “He always kept that stuff private.” And then Bobbi understood that even after Wright’s death his father had respected that privacy. But somehow it was all right for Bobbi, his daughter, to read Wright’s secret books. Once she was old enough. Nearly a woman grown. Grandpap hadn’t