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Date Posted: Tue, March 22 2022, 5:30:12
Author: LadyDuBois
Subject: QOTD for Tuesday March 22nd. the following quote is taken from Lord John And The Hand Of Devils written by Diana Gabaldon. All Rights Reserved






With the horse’s revulsion as guide, he saw what he had overlooked: the churned earth of a badger’s sett, half hidden by the sprawling roots of a large elm. Once focused on this, he could pinpoint the noise as coming from it. And damned if he’d ever heard a badger carry on like that!


Pistol drawn and primed, he edged toward the bank of earth, keeping a wary eye on the nearby trees.


It was certainly crying, but not a child; a sort of muffled whimpering, interspersed with the kind of catch in the breath that injured men often made.


“Wer ist da?” he demanded, halting just short of the opening to the sett, pistol raised. “You are injured?”


There was a gulp of surprise, followed at once by scrabbling sounds.


“Major? Major Grey? It is you?”


“Franz?” he said, flabbergasted.


“Ja, Major! Help me, help me, please!”


Uncocking the pistol and thrusting it back in his belt, he knelt and peered into the hole. Badger setts are normally deep, running straight down for six feet or more before turning, twisting sideways into the badger’s den. This one was no exception; the grimy, tear-streaked face of the young Prussian soldier stared up at him from the bottom, his head a good foot below the rim of the hole.


The boy had broken his leg in falling, and it was no easy matter to lift him straight up. Grey managed it at last by improvising a sling of his own shirt and the boy’s, tied to a rope anchored to Hognose’s saddle.


At last he had the boy laid on the ground, covered with his coat and taking small sips from the bottle of ale.


“Major—” Franz coughed and spluttered, trying to rise on one elbow.


“Hush, don’t try to talk.” Grey patted his arm soothingly, wondering how best to get him back to the bridge. “Everything will be—”


“But Major—the red coats! Der Inglischeren!”


“What? What are you talking about?”


“Dead Englishmen! It was the little boy; I heard him, and I dug, and—” The boy’s story was spilling out in a torrent of Prussian, and it took no little time for Grey to slow him down sufficiently to disentangle the threads of what he was saying.


He had, Grey understood him to say, repeatedly heard the crying near the bridge, but his fellows either didn’t hear or wouldn’t admit to it, instead teasing him mercilessly about it. At last he determined to go by himself and see if he could find a source for the sound—wind moaning through a hole, as his friend Jurgen had suggested.


“But it wasn’t.” Franz was still pale, but small patches of hectic color glowed in the translucent skin of his cheeks. He had poked about the base of the bridge, discovering eventually a small crack in the rocks at the foot of a pillar on the far side of the river. Thinking that this might indeed be the source of the crying, he had inserted his bayonet and pried at the rock—which had promptly come away, leaving him face to face with a cavity inside the pillar, containing a small, round, very white skull.


“More bones, too, I think. I didn’t stop to look.” The boy swallowed. He had simply run, too panicked to think. When he stopped at last, completely out of breath and with legs like jelly, he had sat down to rest and think what to do.

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Replies:

[> How horrible. The first sentence “the horse’s revulsion as a guide” sure sets the scene. Do you remember when that little girl fell in the well in Texas many years ago? I have a bit of claustrophobia and have always thought badgers were terrifyingly nasty. So to be stuck in a badger sett (new word for me 😊) describes a really, really bad scene but…….cue The Ride of the Valkyrie’s……..Lord John to the rescue! -- Kathy in PA, Wed, March 23 2022, 3:49:53


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