IN THE FOG
The fog lay so heavy in this low country that the float was literally
enveloped in it. Layers of it seemed to move and crowd and push, one
against another, as if there were not room enough for all. One might
have fancied that there were several fogs of different shades and
density, elbowing each other like people in a throng, and trying vainly
to merge.
All this imparted a sense of oppression and restraint to the travellers,
as if they were confined in a cell. They seemed to be submerged in
something almost solid. Scout signals were of no use here; a smoke
message would have been like a cup of water thrown in a lake. No lantern
could have pierced this opaque mass in which they seemed to be embedded.
The boys could see perhaps ten feet ahead of them; the plodding oxen
seemed shadowy like spectral things, and the rattling and clanking of
the shaft and the yoke pins sounded strange in the white silence. Their
environment had none of the companionable quality of darkness; it was
clammy, cheerless, unfamiliar. It was no more like darkness than a
trackless desert is like a trackless forest. Their feeling was more like
that of being lost on the ocean than of being lost in the woods.
Directly beneath them the road was clear but right ahead it seemed to
hover ever on the verge of invisibility; it seemed as if they shovelled
the fog away as they advanced, like a snowbank.
“It’s kind of like going through a tunnel,” Pee-wee said.
“If we’re where I think we are,” said Simon, “we’ll come to a cross-road
after about a mile. Then if we turn to the right we’ll get up on the
hill road again. If we turn to the left we’ll get to the other road.
Anyway we’re going in the right direction; if we weren’t the oxen
wouldn’t be so willing to go. Home Sweet Home is the song they like
best, that’s what the old man says.”
Pee-wee was rather squelched by Simon’s unobtrusive show of homely
knowledge. Our scout was somewhat out of his depth here in this
stifling, milky wilderness where even the friendly trees looked weird
and unsubstantial.
“Will they go home?” he asked.
“A horse would,” said Simon. “Oxen won’t go away from home, I mean the
other way, after they’ve been travelling all day. But they haven’t got
as much sense as horses. They might go home if it was just dark or if it
was a straight road there. They’re better than one of them devil wagons
on a night like this.” That was what Simon called automobiles.
They were soon to witness a demonstration of the truth of this remark,
for a little farther along the road they came suddenly upon a dark mass.
It proved to be the wreck of an auto, which had run into a tree by the
roadside. It was utterly demolished, a jumbled heap of metal crunched up
like paper. It had a ghastly look, outlined as it was, in the thick fog.
It looked grotesque, like a picture without a background. It seemed the
more grim and tragic because there was no human figure near it, dead or
living.
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.