"Can we help you, Uncle?" asked Mavis.
"No, dear, not just at present. It's a question of finding the puncture. Ah! Here it is! And, would you believe it? another bit of broken glass! Some wretched tourist has been picnicking up here, I suppose, and smashed a ginger-beer bottle. Well, now I've found the spot, I can get to work."
It was rather cold standing in the midst of the fog watching Uncle David. The girls began to walk up and down the road instead while they waited for him. They could see a patch of heather on either hand, and occasionally, looming through the mist, the dark body of a mountain pony or a bullock. Quite close to them, on the top of a small mound, was a little old, old worn cross, and they naturally stepped aside to look at it. Perhaps it marked some traveller's grave, or had been part of a shrine in long-ago times. Standing by its shaft they could make out through the fog another cross only a short distance away. It seemed a pity not to inspect this also. It was a far finer one than the first, and they walked all round it; then because they thought they spied a cromlech on the top of another mound they set off to inspect that too. It was not a cromlech after all, only a pile of boulders, so they turned back again.
"Here we are at cross number two," said Merle.
"Ye-e-s," agreed Mavis doubtfully. "It seems to have gone rather smaller, though. I don't remember that clump of ferns at the bottom."
"Well, there's the first cross at any rate. Come along."
But when they reached what they supposed to be the first cross they were more doubtful still. It was quite unfamiliar. Moreover, there was no road within sight of it.
"We—we've come wrong!" faltered Merle.
"There must be several of these crosses."
"Let's go back to that one over there, then perhaps we shall find our first one."