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Every day for two months, February and March, sometimes when the roads were hub-deep with mud, and sometimes when the roads were a glare of ice and snow and driving the big truck was dangerous work, we passed the crucifix. It was the guide-post where four roads forked. One road went up to the old monastery, where we had, in one corner, a canteen.

No wonder, for often as high as twenty teams were hooked on to the enormous wagons of Jerkline Jo, and every animal was obliged to pull to the limit of his strength to move the terrific weight, hub-deep in the clinging mud. This did not tend to improve the road, of course, and all of Drummond's efforts to corduroy it and otherwise preserve a firm path for his machines were unavailing.

There was a single street, hub-deep in mud in the rains, beginning vaguely at the steamboat landing, and ending rather more definitely in the open square surrounding the venerable court-house of pale brick and stucco-pillared porticoes.

The stretch was called the "water scrape." All the five-gallon kegs hanging under the wagons had to be filled, and the teams were hustled day and night in order to get across as quickly as possible. It was a hot country, of soft sand hub-deep and of wind-swept tracts so hard that the wagon wheels left no trace.

Off to the right a derrick floated hub-deep in slime; grapplers from it were clinging to the dredge and the derrick was heaving and splashing like a trapped hippopotamus. All about the submerged machine were Mud-pups, working like strange little beavers as the man supervising the operation wiped mud from his face and carried on a running line of shouts, curses, whistles and squeaks.

A smaller wheel would soon have been "hub-deep" and hopelessly stuck. So, too, with the carriages of the nabobs. The poorer people, when they travelled at all, went on foot or on horseback, as our ancestors did. The nabobs had their volantes, still occasionally, but with increasing rarity, seen in some parts of the island.