“You’re right, Mart,” admitted Jeanette. “I don’t mean that I actually doubted your word; but, as I said, the process is so unattractive.”
“I agree with you,” said Nancy. “Someone ought to invent a more gracefully way of handling them.”
“Someone ought to invent a means of keeping the time from passing so quickly,” observed Miss Ashton. “We are due in the bus in ten minutes.”
A light fog was beginning to be seen and felt as they took their old places in the bus.
“Couldn’t you have ordered a better afternoon?” asked Martha saucily of Jim as they left the hotel behind. “And don’t forget that you promised to show us some ox teams to-day. In fact, you told us we’d see a lot yesterday, and not even one appeared.”
“I’ll do my best,” was Jim’s brief reply. He was not much of a talker at any time, except when his work required it; but this afternoon he was more quiet than ever before. Nancy, too, was strangely silent.
The country through which they were riding was sterner, more rugged than any they had yet seen; now rocky shores, rolling stony pastures, few houses, bleak strips of beach seen through a heavy mist, with white billows of fog in the background ready to roll in upon the land at any minute and envelop everything in its baffling embrace.
“Here comes your ox team, Mart,” said Jeanette presently, as they saw in the near distance a team pulling a long low wagon loaded with stone.
Jim good-naturedly stopped the bus and let the girls get out to take a picture of the animals at a watering trough where they paused for a drink.
“Why, they have no harness,” said Jeanette, “only that heavy wooden yoke laid across their necks and binding their heads together. How do you guide them?” she asked of the driver.