Poor Badger Read Online Free Page A

their time if you told them about Badger. If you like, I will contact the RSPCA and tell them the situation. They might have a word with Mr Smith. But on the other hand, if they do, he might get fed up and send Badger to market, and who knows what might happen to him there?’
    ‘The meat man?’
    Ros threw herself down on her bed and wept.
    Her father tried to cheer her up, but to himself he had to admit that Ros had got herself into a pretty miserable situation.

CHAPTER FOUR
    AFTER THE HORSE show Fi didn’t come to ride Badger any more. Sometimes the little brothers and sister came, and now Badger was so run down he didn’t buck them off. They trotted round and tried to make him go faster, but he hadn’t the spirit any more, because he hadn’t enough food. They drummed on his sides with their heels and he would lurch into a weary canter, and they would shout and hit him with a stick.
    Ros had been sternly warned by her father to keep out of Mr Smith’s way. She was frightened of him, anyway.
    But she lay on the top of the railway bank behind the fence and watched through the long grass. Badger was getting thinner and thinner with the treatment he received. Soon, Ros thought, the RSPCA would think he was worth bothering with. Her father had told them, and they had seen Mr Smith, they said, and the result was that Mr Smith filled the water bucket more often, and sometimes brought some hay, but only sometimes. It was bad hay, not worth eating. Badger picked at it, and Mr Smith said it showed he didn’t need it.

    Mr Smith guessed who had told the RSPCA.
    Leo said to Ros, ‘He’ll skin you alive if he sees you.’
    ‘Don’t be silly!’
    But she was frightened all the same.
    When the weather started to get colder, she feared for Badger. Mr and Mrs Palfrey feared for Ros.
    ‘If only she didn’t have to pass the wretched pony every day, she would forget about it! It makes her so miserable!’
    ‘It’s a very sad situation. But we can’t do anything about it! We can’t afford to buy him, and Smith would be very unlikely to sell to us anyway – not the way he thinks about us!’
    ‘No. There’s no way we can buy him.’
    ‘I can’t think of anything we can do.’
    One night in November, it started to snow. ‘Very early for snow!’ said Ros’s father, pulling the curtains across. They all sat round a coal fire, watching television.
    When Ros went to bed, she lay watching the snowflakes drifting across her bedroom window, thinking of Badger. She was warm and comfortable and had her mother and father next door, but Badger was cold and hungry and alone, and had nothing to look forward to. There was the whole winter to go yet.
    Ros sat up.
    ‘I will do something,’ she decided. She couldn’t go on feeling so miserable about Badger, and not doing anything. Not for the whole winter! It was too long. She wasn’t a worm, after all. At school she was known as bossy and resourceful, and yet when it came to Badger she was just useless. And Badger deserved more than that.
    ‘I’ll steal him away, and put him somewhere nice,’ she decided.
    ‘You can’t!’ Leo said the next day.
    ‘I can. I’ve only told you because I might want some help, not so that you can say stupid things like that. No one will know who’s done it, not if we do it in the middle of the night, and take care no one sees us.’
    Leo considered.
    ‘In the middle of the night?’
    ‘It would have to be, I think.’
    ‘The car park is lit up all night. You can see it from here. And the police drive through it, my dad says, to stop the public toilets getting vandalized.’
    The car park was the only way out of the rough field, apart from the footbridge over the railway. One side was all houses, and the other had a high wire fence and the back of an industrial estate.
    ‘I’ll work it out,’ Ros said defiantly.
    The idea, having taken hold, possessed her.
    ‘The only way out is over the footbridge, and across the main road,’ Leo said.