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Occasionally a low hill loomed out of the darkness, the shadows deepening around it; now and then the buckboard passed through a draw, the wheels sinking hub-deep in the loose sand. Several dry arroyos crossed the trail, but with a knowledge that seemed almost marvelous Norton cleverly avoided these pitfalls.
"You wouldn't want to make a mistake would you?" Crown rose to that. "Why? What do you know specially?" "Well, not so much, maybe. But it's worth thinking about. I'll give you the facts confidentially, of course. Hub Hill's about a hundred yards from this house, on the road to Washington. When automobiles sink into it hub-deep, they come out with a lot of mud on their wheels black, loamy mud.
Dashing against the southern hillside, these marching columns dissolved in torrents that Ruth could hear roaring down from the tree-tops and rushing in miniature floods through the forest. The road was all awash. The cars stood almost hub-deep in a yellow, foaming flood. The roadside ditches were not deep here, and the sudden freshet was badly guttering the highway.
"Can we be of any assistance?" "I guess I can make it," I said, scraping the mud off my trousers and boots. "Gee-up there, Liney!" My cows settled slowly into the yoke, and standing, as they did now, on firm ground, they deliberately snaked the wagon, hub-deep as it was, out of the mire, and stopped at the word on the western side of the mud-hole. "Good work, Mr. Vandemark!" he said.
'We found it the only way to fight the prairie mud. Look! Where the daring road ended, there lay unsubdued, level with the pale asphalt, the tenacious prairie, over which civilisation fought her hub-deep way to the West. And with asphalt and concrete they fight the prairie back every building season.
I never sat under a preacher who had better reasoning powers or a worse way of reasoning. Down in front of him sat Grandma Thorndyke, listening intently, and smiling up to him whenever he got in hub-deep; but at the same time her hands were clenched into fists in her well-darned black-silk gloves. I did not know all this then, for her back was toward us; but I saw it so often afterward!
We traveled at snail's pace over twisting roads where our wagon strained and creaked in tortuous ruts almost hub-deep, and where the scraggly horses lay against their collars and tugged valiantly at the traces. Quail started up before us with their whir of softly drumming wings and disappeared into the thick cover of timber. Squirrels barked and scampered to hiding at our coming.
"At the worst, we can back out of this, Millie," said she. "Of course we can," Millie said, suppressing frightened tears with some courage. The water was washing roughly against the running boards; to an onlooker the car would have had the appearance of being afloat, hub-deep, at sea. Slowly, slowly, slowly they were still moving. The car stopped short. The engine was dead.
Sometimes in the bottoms, where the way ran through soft shale, teaming wheels had cut hub-deep furrows where a beast could break a leg with a miscalculated step.
The regular road was a fair one in good weather, but, after such a rain as had fallen, this trail was hub-deep with mud in more than one spot. "Oi'll not go thot trail," was Delaney's comment. "Oi'll take the upper road." "Thot's roight, Mike," put in Rosy, his wife. "It's not meself as wants to stick fast in this black mud. Sure, and it's worse nor the bogs of Erin!"
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