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.