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.