"Who says so?" Paul wanted to know.
"My Uncle Zadkiel was a weather predictor, and he said geese in the trough is a fore-doomer of storm."
Grandpa started the car, a troubled look on his face.
The day at school seemed never-ending. Maureen answered questions like a robot. She heard her own voice say, "Christopher Columbus was one of the first men who believed the world was round. So he went east by sailing west."
"Very good, Maureen. You may sit down."
But Maureen remained standing, staring fixedly at the map over the blackboard. Her mind suddenly went racing across the world, and backward in time, to a tall-masted ship. Not the one that Columbus sailed, but the one that brought the ponies to Assateague. And she saw a great wind come up, and she watched it slap the ship onto a reef and crack it open like the shell of an egg, and she saw the ponies spewed into the sea, and she heard them thrashing and screaming in all that wreckage, and one looked just like Misty.
"I said," the teacher's voice cut through the dream, "you may sit down, Maureen."
The class tittered as she quickly plopped into her seat.
In Paul's room an oral examination was about to take place. "We'll begin alphabetically," Miss Ogle announced. "Question number one," she said in her crisp voice. "With all books closed, explain to the class which is older, the earth or the sea, and where the first forms of life appeared. We'll begin with Teddy Appleyard."
Teddy stood up, pointing to a blood-splotched handkerchief he held to his nose. He was promptly excused.