To Pee-wee, subdued for once by the strangeness and perils of this impenetrable waste, the lonely ruined car seemed like some pathetic wreck on the desolate ocean.
Now and again the lumbering oxen, heedless of the width of their grotesque load, swaggered far enough to left or right to cause it to graze a tree, and more than once the gala caravan was in danger of being cut in two another way, the hay wagon and the superstructure going their separate ways thenceforth.
One other interesting and rather startling thing they saw on this part of their journey. Suddenly out of the fog before them loomed a figure with a cane. He was walking quite briskly and tapping the while with this companionable stick. From the pack on his back he seemed to be a peddler, and he was evidently stone-blind. He stepped nimbly out of the way of the oxen and spoke cheerily as he passed.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said; “a little misty, eh?” Then he was gone, enveloped in the fog again. But they could hear his cane tapping as it occasionally struck a stone. It seemed spooky, how he hiked along not the least embarrassed by the fog and apparently with no knowledge of its density. It impressed Pee-wee the same as if he had seen someone walking on water.
CHAPTER XXI
EVERY WHICH WAY
At last they came to a cross-road and turned to the right. Simon believed that this would bring them into the hill road again. And so it would have if it had gone straight. It was odd how this familiar road, where he had gone black-berrying many a time, had not one familiar thing about it now. He did not know it for a road that he had traveled over every time that he had gone to the creamery. Nor could either he or Pee-wee see how it curved gradually.
Thus it brought them to another road which they thought was the hill road. After they had gone a mile or so on this they realized that it was not. The first cross-road had curved around till it was parallel with the hill road; it was no longer a cross-road. Thus when it crossed another road the boys thought this was the main road and would take them straight home.
In point of fact it was just another cross-road. Soon an unfamiliar house informed Simon that they were not on the main road. They were not as badly off as he thought they were, but he did not know this. A fog is a very funny thing and plays strange pranks with one in one’s own neighborhood.
“We’re lost,” Simon said, stopping the oxen and looking perplexed.