Satan's Bushel by Garet Garrett

raking the grass for bits of her hair that might have blowed out of the house, thinking the old man put a spell on her mind. But as for him being a witch, it was like them inquisitors calling everybody heretics and burning them up because they couldn’t understand what they said. Suppose he could talk with dumb animals, like he said. Wasn’t that on account of him being born Christmas? And if he could read cobwebs and tell what the rest of the winter was going to be according to how the liver and spleen was pointed in a fresh-killed hog, that was knowledge. Whatever you might say it came out that way.
    “Juknow,” the man asked, eyeing Dreadwind keenly—”juknow why you never seen a blue jay on Friday and why on the first Thursday in July at two o’clock all the toads turn pink for thirty minutes?”
    “Why?” said Dreadwind.
    “Ask him,” the man answered.
    With that he was through. He became suddenly apprehensive. To further questions he returned evasive, suspicious monosyllables. Dreadwind offered to shake hands. The man hastily popped out of the gate.
    “Never shake hands over a gate,” he said.
    At the next place, twelve miles south, there was a tidy woman who never let her dishwater stand and was careful of her hair. She had liked Cordelia and felt very sorry for her on the ground that in being so devoted to that old curmudgeon of a father she was throwing her life away. It seemed hardly natural, and such a lovely girl too. However, she said nothing against Weaver directly. Her husband smiled vaguely, a little uneasily, at some secret recollection of the old man, saying: “He’s a character all right.” Dreadwind said he had been told that Weaver was a kind of witch who worked upon people’s superstitions.
    “Yes,” said the man. “He might do that But you’ll see there’s generally some point to it. There are people you can’t get at in any other way for their own good. There’s a man near here that never fed his stock properly. Weaver told him at twelve o’clock Christmas Eve cows kneel down and talk with the devil in the language of the Old Testament and complain if they haven’t been used right. And that was the reason he had been having bad luck. The man believed it. Weaver nailed two brooms in a cross on the barn—you can see them as you go by—and said they would keep evil spirits away as long as the cows got enough to eat. And he believed that. It was good for the cows. What’s more, the man’s having better luck.”
    “Anything else?” Dreadwind asked.
    “He can find water with a peach twig,” said the man. “I never took any stock in that myself until I saw him do it right here on this place.”
    In that way and from place to place Dreadwind got a lot of information he was not seeking, all of it interesting, and nothing to the main point. Nobody knew who Weaver was nor how it happened that he came to be wandering over the wheat country year after year with a beautiful daughter attached. Their trail was easy to follow in this backward fashion until it jumped off the earth in Texas. It appeared to have started there, not once but several times, for people remembered their coming again and again; only here nobody knew whence they came or where they had been last. Here was their point of departure, it seemed, but not their source; and Dreadwind was more mystified than ever.
    He had been three times to see a family that was said to have known the Weavers in a time long past. The last member of the family had now denied it. The clew was therefore false and Dreadwind was leaving it.
    Outside the gate in the shade of an ash tree, on a little bench, sat a man who had long since ceased to observe the world or mind its vanities. He had cut it off. His hands were folded, his knees lay together, his toes turned in, and the long, wonderful beard that had absorbed his masculinity was tucked into his shirt bosom. He seemed very little, very old and wholly impenetrable. Dreadwind had noticed