After that we asked Tony if he would just as soon let us take the boards away from underneath his wagon so that he could move the wagon away from over those old sunken, rusty tracks, just about seven or eight feet or so.
He said, “No mova. Gotta de license. No mova.”
Gee whiz, if that’s what you call diplomacy, I like arithmetic better, and that isn’t saying much.
CHAPTER V—WE GO OVER THE GROUND
The next night Mr. Ellsworth (he’s our scoutmaster) came out early from the city so he could follow that track with us over to the river and say if he thought there was any chance of getting the car to the shore.
Tom Slade (he works in Temple Camp office) went with us. Before he was grown up he was in the Elk Patrol, but he’s assistant scoutmaster now. He doesn’t say much—he’s like Pee-wee, only different. He started the Elk Patrol, I started the Silver Foxes, and I’ll finish them, too, if they don’t look out. Gee, you can’t keep that bunch quiet. The Silver Fox Patrol is all right, only it hasn’t got any muffler.
Mr. MacKeller went with us, too, that night. He’s County Engineer. He’s got dandy apple trees up at his house. He went so he could decide if the track was safe over the marsh. Because, gee whiz, we didn’t want to break down and have our summer home in among a lot of cat-tails. I hate cats anyway. My sister has two of them.
We all met Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. MacKeller at the station and then we started following the old track. Some places we could hardly find the rails at all. We didn’t stop at Tony’s because Mr. Ellsworth said buying frankfurters wouldn’t do any good. He said Tony’s wasn’t the worst part of our trouble; he said Slausen’s Auto Repair Shop was worse, because it was a regular building.
After we got by Slausen’s, the tracks were buried in the earth across the Sneezenbunker land. Some places they were as deep as an inch under the ground. But where that land began to slant down into the marsh the track came out good and plain. Before it got right into the marsh it ran along on an old kind of rotten trestle, and it ran all the way across the marsh on that. I guess that trestle was about three or four feet above the marsh. It’s there yet, only you can’t see it from the town on account of the high cat-tails all around.
That marsh sort of peters out into Van Schlessenhoff’s field, right close to the river, and there the track is flat on the land again and in some places it’s away under the grass.