"What a way to spend the time!" he exclaimed. "Their eyes tight shut and their legs spread out like dried fruit. They'll never discover a new grape and have the most famous champagne in the world called after them. Come on!"
Mollie had been listening for a little while to a distant rumble. It now resolved itself into the uneven racketty grind of heavy cart-wheels on a rough track. She went forward with Hugh, and, shading her eyes from the glare of the sun, looked up the road which wound between the trees of the wood they were in. As she watched, the carts came into view round a bend of the track, and soon they were passing before her. A team of six oxen drew each heavy load—such a load as Mollie had never seen in her life. Grapes! Grapes piled up like turnips! They had been thrown in by careless hands accustomed to working with rich harvests, and here and there they hung over the sides, or dropped to the ground, to be trodden under foot by indifferent beasts and weary men.
The noise of trampling feet and creaking wheels disturbed the sleepers, who, one by one, got up and came beside Mollie and Hugh. There was a smell of hot grapes in the air, mingled with the smell of sweating oxen, dry grass, and pungent eucalyptus, and the spilled juice of grapes mixing with the hot dust of the track added a peculiar aroma of its own to the general nosegay, as Dick described it. Mollie thought that she could never remember smelling anything so thirst-inducing in all her days. When the last cart had disappeared down the winding road, and the noisy rattle had died away to a distant rumble again, Hugh sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree and stretched his arms.
"Where are they going?" asked Dick, now wideawake and curious. "What happens next?"
"They're going to Mr. von Greusen's place to be made into wine," Hugh answered, "and it's a funny thing that however nice grapes are raw they are all equally nasty when turned into wine. Some go sour and black and you call it claret, and some go sharp and yellow and you call it Frontignac or any other silly yellow name. What I should like to invent would be a kind of drink that tasted of grapes, fresh sweet grapes. I'd add a dash of peach, and a slice or two of melon, and a bottle of soda-water. And just enough powdered sugar. And ice."
"Let's go and get the things now and make it this very minute," said Grizzel, tying on her sun-bonnet and making ready to start. "I'm so thirsty."
"It's too late to-day, and besides I'm tired. There was a man up there who wanted to know all sorts of things about the vineyards. Mr. von Greusen was too busy to go round with him, so he sent me. He was pleased with me for discovering that grape. The man's name is John Smith. I think he is French."
Mollie laughed.
"What are you laughing at?" asked Hugh, looking all ready to be offended.
"Oh—nothing—I'm not laughing," Mollie declared; "it's only a sort of tickle; I get it sometimes."