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.
Mr. MacKeller said he didn’t know how we’d get the car over there, but
he guessed the trestle across the marsh would hold it all right. He said
even if it collapsed there probably wouldn’t be much damage, only the
car would be broken and we’d never get it away from there, and if we
camped in it we’d be eaten up by mosquitoes.
“Good night,” I told him; “if there’s any eating to be done we want to
be the ones to do it.”
He said that getting Tony’s lunch wagon and Slausen’s Auto Repair Shop
out of the way wasn’t the kind of work for an engineer. “That’s a job
for a strategist,” he said.
Oh, boy, you should have heard Pee-wee shout. “_What did I tell you?
What did I tell you?_” he began hollering.
Honest, I was afraid he’d tumble off the trestle into the marsh.