San Antonio light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1911-1993, 1925-11-22
CONTINUED from Page 10)

manner as any honest woman.
Even with touch of the grande
dame.
Holding to each other as though
ley We're drowning, the two girls
picked their, way to the farther
snd of the long, low loft--for it
was no mere than that. Their
hearts were hammering. Every
creaking, tip-toed step that carried
them further into the dark added
to their breads. They were in ex-
pectation of long tentacles cast
round their ankles or bat-wings
beating about their heads.
Halloween is both the best and
the worst night to pay visit to
a, witch.
After tireless, nightmare mo-
.ments they found and raised the
trapdoor, and with innumerable
pains and terrors descended the
vertical ladder into the open stable
that was below. The trapdoor,
clumsily lowered, fell into place
with heavy bang.
The witch, sitting forward on
her stool, with her drawn face set
toward the charcoal hearth, chafed
between her palms the silver coin
Margaret had given her. 1t seemed
to warm her, though her lightish
eyes of a child were a thousand
miles away.
What life had been that of
this big-boned, clairvoyant fool! A
tall, rather weakly, handsome girl
of good blood, who had been
turned out into the street by rela-
tives terrified at the rappings that
followed her, and the mysterious
movements of tables, stools and
settles. An alchemist and his wife
had offered shelter, and then, in
the innermost chamber of his lab
oratories, she had submitted to
hypnotism in order that material
ization'' might follow upon her
trance, and the true philosophers
stone," the living, speaking, palp-
able, if transient, eidolon be OBJ
tanned.
But the end of these stupendous
experiments of secret science was
banal feshly disaster, for the al
chemist-dark, dynamic, of south
ern blood-betrayed the guest
and the bitter wife, threatening to
denounce him to the townsfolk as
black magician if he demurred,
drove out the girl and her girl
child.
Then had followed wretched
wandering and final refuge in the
hut of a lonely woman suspected
of witchcraft. Here years had
passed, the woman died, and her
hut-mate inherited her reputation
and number of unintelligible
formulate written on parchment in
ink and blood, together with reci-
pes for love philters, febrifuges,
slow poisons.
Lisa, the outcast, and her girl
might have remained here until
the cows came home, but a hue
and cry was raised, the poor
novice-witch was forced to attempt
the ordeal of the white-hot plough
shares, and then fled, limping, for
from that day she was Lame Lisa.
Now, for a matter of twelve
months, the four walls of loft
had been her boundaries.
She abode in it like a crippled
rabbit in a burrow. Folk came to
her-always at night and always
timid as mice. She sold them the
various mixtures of the recipes,
and told their good or bad for
tunes, and supplied them with lit
the images of wax, that could be
melted over a slow fire if the
death of an enemy was desired, or
heart-pierced with a rose-thorn to
procure the love of some indiffer-
ent person.
Almost as abiect in her manner
of living as a leper, lame, pain
aged, nocturnal and afflicted with
an unreasoning love of cats, she
was solaced by sense of stateli-
ness and Importance.
But, always, her heart was the
heart of a small animal that had
been hunted. ~.
Time passed. Both cats drowsed,
bumped up with bristling fur. The
witch-like Atrepos cloaked in
patchw Jrk or a sordid Sybil--hung
forward on her stool. The prim
mouth, with its downward droo,,
was pursed; the uncombed, gray
shot hair was Ill about the eyes
of her.,
A