“You planning to go farther than that?” he asked us.
“Yes, but we have to think of a way,” Westy called up to him.
Mr. Jenson began laughing and he said, “You kids’ll have to do some tall thinking to get past that old building.”
“That’s all right,” Westy said; “the human mind can move anything.”
Mr. Jenson just said, “All right, over she goes.”
Some of us got on the car and the others walked along and the girls stayed around, laughing. A couple of them got on the car, but most of them were kind of afraid, I guess. Maybe they thought it would never stop. Some men stood around watching and laughing, too. What did we care?
The locomotive pushed the car so slow that we could walk ahead of it. It hardly moved. We felt pretty important when we saw the gates go down across Main Street and people and automobiles waiting till we got past. Most of the scouts who had come from other towns had gone home and only our own troop and the girls and a few others were there. But a whole lot of people were standing around watching and laughing at our old ramshackle car. It went right over Tony’s new mushroom farm, and then Mr. Jenson’s fireman came down and we helped him haul a big piece of timber across the tracks about in the middle of the field, because the brakes on that car weren’t much good.
Pretty soon the locomotive stopped and our old car just moved so slow that it hardly moved at all. Then, kerplunk, the wheels ran against the piece of timber, and the first stage of our what-d’you-call-it, memorable journey, was over.
After that we helped Tony get his lunch wagon back to where it belonged, and we all gave Mr. Jenson three cheers when the milk train pulled out. The boy scouts are all right, and you can see for yourself that you can do a lot by concerted appetite. But you need brains, too. And if it hadn’t been for the Girl Scouts and the Erie Railroad, where would we be, I’d like to know? So that’s why my favorite heroes are the Girl Scouts and the Erie Railroad. Maybe they’re both kind of slow—I’m not saying—but good turns are what count.