When the pickaxe was in the ground, each man gave a kind of a pry that loosened the dirt.
And when they had picked, the men went ahead a little short step and picked a new place and left the loosened dirt behind, so that, pretty soon, they were walking on the dirt that they had loosened.
The cat had got tired of lying between the little boy's feet and having no attention paid to her, so she got up and ran off a little way, and stopped and looked back, but the little boy wouldn't look.
So she walked back, with her bushy tail straight up in the air, and rubbed against the little boy's legs.
Still the little boy didn't notice her. And the reason why he didn't notice her was that the horses were being hitched to the big iron scoop.
As soon as the horses were hitched to the scoop, they started walking along; and the scoop turned right over on its face, upside down, because the man didn't have hold of the handles.
And the horses dragged the scoop, upside down, and it bumped over the stones and made a ringing kind of noise, and they dragged it in between the boards and over the dirt that had been loosened by the pickaxes, and when they got to the end of the loosened dirt, they stopped.
THE DIRT-SCOOP