CHAOS AND CONFUSION

Whatever the dog’s business he evidently had no time to lose and he chose the quickest and shortest route, which was straight under the oxen’s legs. He was scarcely beneath the patient beasts when he encountered an altogether surprising set back.

Something, he knew not what, hit him upon his democratic little nose. He snapped quickly for this and immediately found himself enmeshed in a hopeless entanglement. He knew nothing of the recent festivities at Snailsdale and was quite unaware of the bunting streamers which waved so flauntingly from the swishing tails of the oxen. It was one of these that had assailed him, and as he snapped at it and then backed away pulling it after him, it seemed to him as if he had suddenly aroused an enraged surrounding army.

Eight sturdy legs, reinforced by two violently swishing tails equipped with a hundred million entangling lashes enclosed him and assailed him from every direction. He was presently enshrouded with wet streamers, lying on his back, biting, kicking, while the oxen stamped and lashed their patriotic appendages to his utter confusion. It must have seemed to the humble little traveller that the whole world had risen against him and were holding him in a kind of diabolical maze assaulting from every angle and pouring their blighting strokes from above.

But he held his own bravely as the oxen, aroused to life at last, backed and reared and pulled against each other in their yoke. As in the World War all nations were eventually drawn into the maelstrom, so now the neutral masters of the caravan were drawn into the chaotic affray, striving to hold the rearing, frightened beasts, and at the same time conducting a flank attack against the bewildered and enmeshed dog.

At last the little warrior who had brought this allied host of eight legs, two tails, two boys and ten billion streamers as it seemed, against him, emerged from the gory field of battle with his colors flying and went scooting off with a red, white and blue streamer held between his teeth and waving like a pennant in the fog. Where he went to no mortal ever knew. But he was never seen upon that road again. Probably he thought it was haunted by all the fiends of perdition.

He started the conflagration but he did not finish it. The oxen, once aroused to action, could not be subdued. Even Scout Harris could not “handle” them. They stood at right angles to their shaft, pulling, jerking, wrenching, and though Simon by the dextrous use of his whip and a series of uproarious “geeee’s” succeeded in restoring them to companionable position, they straightway adapted a new and altogether unexpected maneuver, in which the magic word of geee seemed to have lost its potent spell. They backed up.

“Geee—up!” shouted Simon, standing beside him and exhibiting the whip like a magnet for them to follow, “geeeeee—up!”

But instead they continued to gee back. Pee-wee was in the superstructure (or whatever you choose to call it) when the climax occurred. He was getting his scout staff with which to handle the situation. The two rear wheels of the float were now off the road and on the grassy slope. Simon tried with might and main to drive the beasts forward but to no avail. Something was pulling from the rear and why should they set themselves against that? By a continued and thunderous use of the magic word, Simon at last persuaded the stolid beasts to stand still. But this was the utmost concession they would make.

And then the climax occurred. Near the end of the shaft a long iron bolt was driven through it up and down. The shaft rested in a groove on the yoke which kept it from moving too much from side to side. At this point the pin went through both shaft and yoke. The nut which should have screwed on this bolt below had long since gone the way of nuts which belong on Fords, yes and on Packards too.

The position of the wagon was slanting, it was nearly half on the slope. This had a tendency to raise the end of the shaft. Thus the bolt was lifted out. And with medley of squeaks and groans as the ramshackle caravan adjusted itself to the hubbly hillside, Pee-wee’s architectural masterpiece, with our hero inside it, went rolling down the slope and into the dense fog below.

Thus the returning legion was divided, Pee-wee and the float constituting one division, and Simon and the oxen the other.