CHAPTER XXXI—SLIGHT MOMENTUM
The afternoon that I’m telling you about was a couple of weeks after the other two patrols went up to Temple Camp. They went on the Fourth of July. They went off on the Fourth, that’s what we said.
By that time the cat-tails down in the marsh were all grown up thick and tall, and when we got past the Sneezenbunker land where the marsh begins, we had to just push our way through them because the trestle was sort of buried in them. They were so tall that they were up to our heads. Where the trestle was open they grew right up between the tracks, and we had to watch where we were going to keep from walking off the trestle.
Now that framework trestle ran down about as far as the middle of the marsh, where the marsh was deepest, and there the wood under the tracks was solid. There was marshy stuff, like moss, kind of, growing between the cracks in the boards, and the cat-tails were close in all around so we could hardly see what was under us. It was like that for maybe five hundred feet or so, and then the tracks were on a trestle again till they ran onto the solid land of Van Schlessenhoff’s field.
We spent a couple of hours down there in Van Schlessenhoff’s field, digging the earth away from the old tracks. Now those tracks ended right close to the river.
But we didn’t want the car to go quite as far as that, so we spent the rest of the day fixing up a kind of a thing to stop the car. We dug holes and planted big heavy beams, and then put other beams down slantingways, just the way bumpers are built in the terminal of the railroad.
The next afternoon we waited for the milk train. I said to Mr. Jenson, “We’ve got the tracks all cleared and dug out for our car and we want you to give it a shove,” I said. “We built a bumper down by the river so as to be sure the car will stop if the brakes don’t work, because the brakes are not much good.”
He said, “Suppose the trestle collapses?”
I said, “That’s up to us. We’ll stay off the car till it stops. Safety first. If we lose the car it will be our fault and we won’t blame you.”
He said, “I haven’t got much faith in that old trestle. It’s all up and down like a scenic railroad in an amusement park. It’s all spongy underneath it.”
I said, “But we’ll promise to stay off the car till it stops.”
He said, “Well, and suppose the marsh should flood like it always does in the summer. What then? You’ll be under water.”
“We’ll shut the windows and the doors,” Alexis piped up; “and we’ll have a tube going up to the top.”
“Sure,” I said, “we’ll take a couple of tubes of tooth paste with us.”
“Twenty thousand leagues under the marsh,” Charlie Seabury shouted.
I said, “When we once get past the marsh everything will be all right. The tracks go a little up hill through the field, and that field is never flooded. We’ll be high and dry there.”
“It was under water three years ago in the spring freshets,” Mr. Jenson said.
“It wasn’t up to our knees,” Westy told him. “And it went down in a couple of days.”
I said, “We should worry about Van Schlessenhoff’s field being flooded. The water would never come up to the floor of the car anyway. Besides, the freshets aren’t as fresh as they used to be. They wouldn’t put anything like that over on us.”
Mr. Jenson just laughed and he said, “They’d put it over you because you’d be underneath. There are a lot of floods up the line this summer.”
“Let them stay there,” I said. “Only will you please give our car a shove for us?”
Then we all started to shout, “Ah, please, Mr. Jenson.” “Go ahead, Mr. Jenson.” “We’ll do something for you some day, Mr. Jenson.”
He just sat there in the window of his locomotive kind of laughing, as if he couldn’t make up his mind. We kept shouting at him good and loud, because the men were making so much racket loading milk cans onto the train.
After a while he said, “Well, if you’ll promise not to yell if the trestle breaks down, and if you’ll stay off the car till it stops, I’ll give it a shove for you.”
I said, “Give it a good shove so it will go all the way. We built a bumper down there to stop it, so it’s all right.”
He said, “Well, we won’t trust too much to the bumper. If your car goes into the river, that’s an end of it.”
“We’ll start a mermaid patrol,” Pee-wee shouted.
So then Mr. Jenson sent a brakeman over to see if the brakes on the car were any good. We knew they were kind of broken; I guess that’s why they called them brakes. We couldn’t tell whether they’d stop the car, because the car was already stopped. We’d have to start it to find out whether they’d stop it. The brakeman said maybe they’d work all right on slight momentum.
“Slight momentum—what’s that?” Pee-wee shouted.
“It’s Latin for going slow,” I told him; “it’s the way your tongue goes—not.”
“Slight momentum means not much headway,” Westy said. Some highbrow.
I said, “If it means going slow I should think it would be footway and not headway.”
“Maybe it will be downway instead of upway,” Dorry Benton said.
“We should worry,” I told him. “We’ll never save any money with the car as near Bennett’s as this.”
Westy said, “Nothing ventured, nothing had.”
“All right,” we all shouted, “let’s go!”
So that was the beginning of the big adventure. Before so very long we had Alice in Wonderland tearing her hair from jealousy. We had Submarine Sam beaten twenty ways. We had the Arabian Nights knocked out in the first inning. We were lost, strayed or stolen. Also mislaid, misled, mishapped, misguided, mistaken and a few other things. Anyway, we were missed.