Poor Badger Read online

  ‘Sid can keep him! He wants him – you can tell. He likes him, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I certainly got that impression.’

  ‘Can we go and tell him?’

  ‘We’ll go back this afternoon.’

  Ros sat in the car feeling as if all her senses were zinging. Her head reeled. Her father was laughing – he was as relieved as she was. When they got home they told the story to Dora Palfrey, and then Leo came round, hot-cheeked and said, ‘Guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I came home from Safeway’s this morning and I met Albert – you know, with the dog – and he said he saw Mr Smith come with some rotten old hay for Badger, and when he saw he’d gone he just collected up the chain and the tether pin and said to Albert, “Blooming good riddance!” and drove away!’

  ‘Well, that just about buttons it up,’ Harry said.

  Ros told Leo about visiting Sid and the police station.

  ‘Sid wants him, and now he can have him. Can’t he, Dad? It’s all right?’

  ‘It sounds all right to me.’

  ‘It’s very all right,’ Leo said.

  ‘And we can visit him every day.’

  After lunch they all went back to tell Sid what had happened. The snow was falling – it was going to be a white Christmas. But a happy white Christmas. Ros was bursting with happiness. She could never have enjoyed the snow if Badger had still been standing there abandoned beside the railway line. He came for her carrots, and pushed his soft lips at her pockets and Sid stood watching them, chewing his cigarette.

  ‘Ponies need work,’ he said. ‘I might get him a cart, and do some scrap-collecting. I did that once. There’s money in it, close to a town like this. He’s just the job for that. He’d like that. Now he’s mine like.’

  ‘Well, yes, we’d like you to keep him, now it seems all straight with the police.’

  ‘You might meet Mr Smith, when he’s in the cart,’ Ros said dubiously.

  Sid grinned. ‘I know how to handle the likes of Mr Smith!’

  ‘I can come and see him?’

  ‘Every day, mate.’

  The carrots were all gone and it was beginning to get dark. The headlights of the cars on the main road made distant weaving patterns through the leafless trees and the snow was growing crunchy underfoot. Ros went home with her father, thinking about Badger. She had had a dream of riding him one day . . .

  ‘I wish —’

  ‘I know, love.’

  They turned out of Sid’s lane towards home.

  ‘He’s happy. That’s what matters. And pulling a cart is a good job for a pony – steady, slow work . . . horses thrive on that. You know the old canal horses, that pulled the barges, used to live till forty, it suited them so?’

  What odd things her father did know.

  ‘Do you think it will suit Badger?’

  ‘Better than showjumping.’

  Ros remembered the day at the show, and shivered.

  Badger had got his Christmas and was going to stay lucky, she knew that now. And she had got very nearly everything she had ever wanted. No one ever got everything after all – how dull that would be. She gave a little skip in the snow, and her father laughed.

  ‘Happy Christmas!’

  Happy Christmas after all.

  About the Author

  Kathleen M Peyton is a top-selling author of more than thirty novels, the best-known of which is FLAMBARDS which, with its sequels, was made into a TV serial. The winner of both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award for her work, this is her seventh title for the Transworld children’s lists.

  Also by K.M. Peyton

  DARKLING

  THE WILD BOY AND QUEEN MOON

  THE BOY WHO WASN’T THERE

  POOR BADGER

  AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 15714 3

  Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK

  A Random House Group Company

  This ebook edition published 2012

  Copyright © K. M. Peyton, 2012

  Illustrations copyright © Mary Lonsdale, 2012

  First Published in Great Britain

  Corgi Childrens 2012

  The right of K. M. Peyton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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