The Hex Witch of Seldom (8 page)

He stood in his gunfighter stance, looking down at her with keen blue eyes, and Bobbi saw him as if she were seeing him for the first time, or the last, saw the tangled mane tossing on his high-flexed neck over the white brand, saw the draggles of mud and fur still plastered to his sides and belly—she had never groomed them off as she had wanted to do. She had never touched the black horse. And now, if she had her way, she would touch him once and he would go back to his wandering life, like a gypsy, ragged but free.

“I know you don't like to be touched,” said Bobbi. “I won't lay a hand on you unless you come to me. And I won't ask it of you, because I know you feel you have to do what I ask. But I want you to let me be your friend, just this once. It'll just be for a minute, for me to take the halter off, and then you'll go away. You won't have to see me again.”

Shane stood motionless, and Bobbi stood just as still, afraid to move, wondering what more she could say, watching him make up his mind.

Then Shane moved. He came forward, and the sunrise light caught on his head and made his black forelock shine white. He came toward her, not in the hesitant way a horse would, but like a man who has decided to risk something: steadily, firmly. He did not stop until he faced Bobbi within arm's reach. Then he planted his feet and stood like a captive soldier, unmoving.

Bobbi did not take any liberties. Her hand went to the halter catch. For a heartbeat, as she snapped it open, her fingers brushed the smooth hair over Shane's cheekbones. When she lifted the halter off his head, passing the crownpiece over his ears, her wrist felt for a moment the coarser touch of mane. Then the garish red thing was off, and she stepped back, letting it drop to the ground. She nodded to Shane. “Goodbye,” she whispered.

He turned and cantered away up the next rise, his head high and the mane tossing on his neck. Bobbi watched him until he had topped the rise and gone out of sight. Her eyes stung. She felt sure she would never see him again.

Then she stooped, picked up the bag of food Travis had given her, and trudged off westward, the way Shane had gone. There was no sense in heading back toward home. She had some notion where she was going, but she didn't want to head that way yet, not when it would take her out of the woods. For the time she just wanted to stay in the woods and not have to cope with people.

She walked numbly, looking down at the ground in front of her feet, not taking much notice of the birds wildly singing or the sunrise colors in the sky. She made her way slowly to the top of the rise where Shane had left her sight. He would be a mile away by the time she got there—

He was standing in her way, confronting her as he had once confronted her in a corral, and as they had done that time, her eyes caught on his blue-black hooves and traveled up his tough, slim legs to his head and blue-eyed gaze that bored into hers.

“I'm not following you,” she told him. “I—I guess I'm heading for Louisiana. Not that I'm looking forward to it. But I can't go back to Pap.”

Shane stared at her a moment longer. Then with a sudden, imperious turn of his body, he put his side toward her and stood waiting.

It took Bobbi a moment to understand. Then it took her several moments longer to speak. The breath had caught in her throat. She was stunned.

“You—you want me to—to ride you?”

Almost unthinkable, Shane being what he was. But he turned his head and looked back over his shoulder at her impatiently, urging her to get on with it. Even when she placed one hesitant hand on his withers, he did not move away from her.

“You want to—take me with you?”

Still he waited for her. And although she had vaulted onto bareback horses many times, and Shane stood no taller than any of them, somehow Bobbi felt daunted.

But what she had to do, Bobbi Yandro generally could do. She took a deep breath, bent her knees and sprang. She bellied onto Shane's back, swung her leg over, took her place behind his shoulders. She held the bag of food in one hand and laid the other on her thigh, not daring to touch Shane's neck or take hold of his mane.

As soon as he felt her weight settle into place, the stallion started off, and at an easy, fluid lope he carried her away from the slopes of Canadawa Mountain.

Chapter Six

Whatever it was she had talked with the night before had told her some truth, Bobbi found. For within the hour she heard helicopters circling over the forested mountains and knew they were searching for her. She felt a dark satisfaction. Pap must have called the cops after all, and the volunteer firemen and the National Guard and whomever. So he was worried. He deserved to be worried, after what he had said. And she was not about to be caught or go back.

There was no need to say anything to Shane about choppers. The black horse—or whatever Shane was—had carried her under the densest cover of trees at the first sound of beating rotor blades in the distance. The broad-leaf trees, oak and sugar maple and ash and hickory, were mostly bare yet. So as not to be seen in the pale sunlight below their spidery, reaching branches, Shane took her into the pines. These mountains had been logged for white and yellow pine, but there was plenty of scrubby second growth of pine, and fir and hemlock and evergreen laurel. Shane traveled on, under the shelter of their dense boughs. When a chopper drew close—Bobbi could tell by the noise that it was right overhead, though she could not see it—Shane stopped under the evergreen canopy and stayed there until the danger had passed.

“Shane,” Bobbi remarked in a low voice, “I guess there's going to be people on foot and ATV's and stuff after us, too. Maybe even dogs.”

He flickered an ear in acknowledgement and went on. The going was rough, through scraping, prickly branches, over rock outcroppings and fallen tree trunks. Shane chose his own path. Bobbi would not have dreamed of trying to guide him. She balanced herself to his movements and tried not to be a bother to him. He went at the fastest possible gaits, often dangerously so. When he cantered through the trees, lunging across the choppy terrain, she tilted her body to the speed of the canter and went with him, her lips pressed together.

Through the racket of choppers in the sky, Bobbi did not hear the whoosh of cars. But Shane slowed and stopped. He had seen the glint of a pickup barreling along the blacktop. A road lay ahead.

Shane eased forward until he stood behind a laurel thicket near the road. Bobbi saw him watching and listening, waiting for his opening. Not a sweaty hair on him, she noted, except where her thighs pressed hotly against his back and sides. Shane made a coolheaded fugitive. He had been a fugitive often before, and not just as a wild horse stampeding through the sagebrush.

Bobbi felt his hindquarters bunch. He gave her just time to grab hold of his mane before he leaped. With choppers hovering in the distance, but no cars in sight, Shane shot across the pavement, hitting a gallop within a jump of the place where he had been standing still.

The pause behind the laurel thicket was the last time he stopped that morning.

He seemed tireless. He jostled Bobbi over some of the worst terrain she had ever seen, at speed. Yet his courtesy for her never failed. He slowed before going under low branches until he felt by the shifting of her weight on his back that she had seen the danger and ducked. Unlike a horse, he never tried to go under anything too low for her. Sometimes, though, she had to lie flat on his back, with her head pressed against his neck. That embrace felt like intimacy. She could not help a hot, frightened rush of emotion in her heart.

In early afternoon, Shane came to a fair-sized stream and stopped, turning his head toward his rider.

“Yes,” Bobbi answered the unspoken question, “I'd better get a drink.” She slipped off the horse, staggering a little until she got her land legs back, and kneeled on a rock at the stream's edge to drink. She saw Shane lift his head, listening for choppers before he waded in downstream of her and lowered his muzzle to the stream's surface to drink as well. Then he came over to stand in the pool by Bobbi's rock, letting her mount him more easily than she could from level ground.

“Thanks,” she murmured. “Huh?”

Instead of crossing the stream as she expected, Shane was making his way up the middle of it, against the current, picking his way over the scarps of rock.

For more than a mile he waded upstream in rushing water sometimes chest deep. He came out of the stream at last onto a broad shoulder of rock, where he would leave no trail once his wet hoofprints had dried. He followed the rock away from the stream until it dwindled into brushy mountainside again. Then he lunged upslope, crested the ridge, and took off at speed down the other side, toward some distant goal.

It was even more difficult and dangerous to gallop down a mountain than up it or along it. Bobbi gritted her teeth and rode for all she was worth.

Shane had a purpose, she felt sure of it. She felt it through the long bones of her legs, felt it in the horse's sure movements. He was going someplace. But where? Wyoming? He could hardly expect to take her all the way to Wyoming. How would she find food?

She thought of food because she was hungry. And she stayed hungry, very hungry, all that day. Shane seemed to have no thought of stopping to rest or eat, and she would not have asked it of him, not for anything.

At nightfall he finally stopped. For the first time since she could remember, Bobbi stumbled and fell to the ground after dismounting. Riding bareback stretches every muscle. She felt stiff and aching and too starved to care. Not even bothering to move from the clutter of sticks where she had landed, she sat and ate until she felt better. Peanut butter and jelly, thoroughly soggy by then. And a blackened banana. And a Snickers bar, and more sandwiches; she made herself leave them for the next day. Travis had packed for a big appetite. Bless Travis.

Shane had gone off somewhere, out of sight in the woods, to browse or perhaps relieve himself. She had noticed days before that even in the confines of the corral he never did in her presence any of the earthy things that horses customarily do. It had been an unintentional cruelty, keeping him in the corral where there was no privacy. Bobbi regretted it briefly, then gave up thinking about it. Shane was aloof, but not one to hold a grudge against anyone less than truly evil. Knowing he would be back when she woke, as surely as she knew the sun would rise, Bobbi lay down where she was and slept.

In the morning she could barely walk. Sleeping on the ground without covering had not helped her sore muscles. It took all the grit she had just to get onto Shane again.

Her misery eased from the heat of his body and the touch of morning sunshine after a while. Spring was giving her its first warm day, strangely warm and fine for the time of year. One other thing was good: she had not heard a chopper. Shane had brought her into the next county, she felt sure, far away from the focus of the search. Nobody would be looking for them this far west.

Shane must have felt the same way, for when he and Bobbi came to a power line angling south and westward, the horse cantered down the grassy road that ran underneath it. Dirt bike trails spiderwebbed in and out of the pole line, and snowmobile trails, and logging roads. When Shane found a logging road that veered due west, he trotted onto it. Soft dirt, shady and wide, it made far easier, faster going than the deer paths on the mountain ridges. After a while Shane slowed to a walk, and Bobbi was able to eat the rest of her sandwiches as she rode. She stuck the Snickers bar into her windbreaker pocket for later, zipped the pocket closed, and gratefully tossed the bag away. She had been carrying the crumpled thing so long that it seemed her hand had grown into the shape of the brown paper; she flexed her fingers. On Canadawa or the mountains since, where searchers might find it, she had not left any trash. But these woods people had filled with their garbage. She saw it everywhere.

She saw more of it over the next hour or so, as Shane passed from logging road to dirt bike trail to abandoned strip mine access road to snowmobile trail to mine road again, and as he passed from walk to canter to trot and walk and canter. There were junked cars along the roads, dumped tires, rusted-out refrigerators and freezers, even somebody's falling-down trailer and an old armchair with the stuffing coming out. There were beer cans and broken bottles and a naked doll with its arms and legs torn off. There were dumped garbage bags, torn open by animals, their contents strewn and smelly and indecent.

Then, on toward midday, Shane and Bobbi encountered the real garbage. The human trash.

They had been hearing motorcycle buzz for some time. It echoed through the woods, maybe near, maybe far, hard to tell how far or the direction either. Several times Shane had turned off the trail, picking his way through rusting metal to take cover, only to hear the racket fade away along some other path. The area was networked with trails.

This time, when the noise grew louder, Shane Iaid back his ears and kept on walking the way he was going. Bobbi sensed the change in his mood as surely as if he had spoken to her. Fugitive he might be, but he would not be turned aside from his path any longer. He would take his chances.

And as chance would have it, three dirt bikes roared around a turn of the old mine road and shot toward Bobbi and her horse, their riders staring.

She knew right away that these men were trouble. It was not just the way they looked. Bobbi had nothing against long hair and dirty jeans. Lots of men around Canadawa were as dirty and unshaven as these three. But any courteous motorcycle rider cuts his motor and stops his bike when he sees a person on horseback. These men were goons. They grinned and revved their engines louder. At increased speed they rocketed straight at Shane.

“Hey!” Bobbi yelled, angrily, uselessly.

It was a game of chicken, and Shane didn't give an inch. He held to his portion of the road and kept walking. At the last moment the bikers swerved aside and zoomed past with shrill yells that should have scared any horse into a frenzy. Shane didn't flinch.