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.”