Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 06:53:04 -0800
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: Re: (urth) PEACE: Quantrill's gold

Roy wrote:
>Kate really met Quantrill? The "bearded man" in the sectioned-off text on
>page 195 is presumably Quantrill. I don't know why it isn't written from the
>first-person point of view, as would be expected in a diary, but that
>sectioned-off text is from the diary. Lois had been reading to Den from it,
>as is clear from the italicized line at the top of the next page, where Lois
>says: "_So you see it has to be near the river. She mentions it several
>times_." That she was reading to Weer from the diary is explicitly affirmed
>when Weer confronted Gold with the blunder about Hannah having gone to
>Boston (200), which piece of information was included in that sectioned-off
>text on page 195.
>
>Why Weer didn't give the excerpt exactly as written (if he didn't), I don't
>know. He evidently gave his Aunt Bella's article verbatim. Perhaps he just
>wrote down his memory of the mental image he created when Lois read the
>passage to him. Still, Kate's meeting with Quantrill never happened outside
>of that fake diary, afaik. Or have I forgotten something?

That is not the verbatim of the diary text.  If you prefer, it is the image
of the "story behind the veiled text" that Weer imagines as Kate reads it,
but I think it is too close in style to the intrusions of Ghost Kate
interacting with Hannah at the end of the banshee tale (where Hannah speaks
in italics) to be anything else but a ghostly "story behind the veiled
text."

The Boston detail is a difference, especially when Weer is so certain.
OTOH, when teenager Hannah Mills presumably returned with mother and sister
to the farm and discovered that bandits had been there, had locked up her
dad and the hired man and maybe done something unspeakable to beloved Kate,
well that would understandably put a dampener on the whole trip, perhaps
even to the point where the trip would not be mentioned by Hannah.

(Plus, the moonlight tryst with Kate provides another solution to
"Quantrill's buried treasure," since afaik Q did not have any known
offspring, but Kate certainly did.)

=mantis=



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