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It was rough going for the ox-wagons those first ten miles, and they made slow time of it along the base of the hills. It was hot at the base of the hills so hot that when your bridle hand dropped inadvertently to the pommel of the saddle, the brass mounting there seemed to burn you.
Upon arriving at the ranch, late at night, my usually noisy Indians were quietly sleeping in the huge ox-wagons, which had been provided for transportation. I found the front of the ranch lit up by fires built between the stockade and the buildings on a narrow strip of ground, serving for a front yard. I had been informed by the commanding officer at Cottonwood, that Mr.
"I'd better wait till the Colonel comes along," he explained. "The Colonel don't carry any weapons." Loveless stopped with him, and, as Ulyate was somewhere behind with the ox-wagons and porters, this left Kearton, Gobbet, and myself to ride on by ourselves.
I can still recall the resentment and indignation of the Bulgarian officers in 1913 because a French war correspondent had, in a despatch which had escaped the Censor, likened the crossing of the Thracian Plain by the great convoys of Bulgarian ox-wagons to the passage of the Danube by the Huns in the fourth century.
At the capital it is possible to engage guides who speak English, and to hire horses or oxen for transport at an astonishingly cheap rate. The horse-carts of the country are springless and not too comfortable. The ox-wagons, also springless, are quite comfortable, as the oxen move along smoothly and without jerking.
To find things is almost an impossibility. By the end of the week we hope to be much straighter. All the men have worked with a will. This morning they fetched the remaining luggage from the shore, and this afternoon have been working hard at the house. I went down with my camera and took photographs of the boats unloading and of the ox-wagons which had gone to bring up the luggage.
If the ox-transport had not been so perfectly organised, and if the oxen had not been so patiently enduring as they proved to be, the Bulgarian army must have perished by starvation. And yet at Mustapha Pasha a Censor would not allow us to send anything about the ox-wagons. That officer thought the ox-cart was derogatory to the dignity of the army.
A planting-gang consists of drivers for the planters, drivers for the harrows, persons who scatter the seed, and attendants to supply them with seed. The seed is drawn from the gin-house to the field in ox-wagons, and distributed in convenient piles of ten or twenty bushels each.
And by and by the ox-wagons came up, and the oxen brought the flies. For a time then the only sounds were the slow crunching of the feeding horses and an occasional inarticulate snarl from some one or other who foolishly tried to brush the flies away from his face. Eventually, after a long time had passed, Means rode into the grove of trees, un-heralded by Mac and alone.
And on the journey, the good Ugo had made the road seem less weary, and the lumbering ox-wagons less jolty and painful, by telling his bright young charge of all the wonders and relics he had seen in his journeyings in the East; but especially did the girl love to hear him tell of the boy king of the Franks, Hlodo-wig, or Clovis, who lived in the priest's own boyhood home of Tournay, in far-off Belgium, and who, though so brave and daring, was still a pagan, when all the world was fast becoming Christian.
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