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.”
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_.
Now you’d better look on the map I made. Maybe it isn’t much good, but it’s better than the map of Europe. Our car was over about in the middle of the Sneezenbunker land. Because we didn’t want to take the reward from the Orphan Home for finding the inventor, my father said we could offer Tony fifty dollars to move his wagon for a little while. Fifty dollars would buy five hundred sandwiches. It would buy a thousand pieces of pie. We didn’t have any trouble with Tony that time.