Even in the beginning I guess the whole thing was just kind of thrown together. Anyway, the old tracks were all half rusted away. The old line was just about good enough to support that old-fashioned car of ours and that’s about all, except in the place where the trestle was solid; I guess it was stronger there. Anyway, the mosquitoes down there are strong enough. Don’t say a word. They carry machine guns, those mosquitoes. But in the field close to the river it’s dandy. So now I’m going to start another chapter. I bet you think the trestle is going to break down under our car—I bet you’re hoping it will. Just you wait. CHAPTER XXXI—SLIGHT MOMENTUM The afternoon that I’m telling you about was a couple of weeks after the other two patrols went up to Temple Camp. They went on the Fourth of July. They went off on the Fourth, that’s what we said. By that time the cat-tails down in the marsh were all grown up thick and tall, and when we got past the Sneezenbunker land where the marsh begins, we had to just push our way through them because the trestle was sort of buried in them. They were so tall that they were up to our heads. Where the trestle was open they grew right up between the tracks, and we had to watch where we were going to keep from walking off the trestle. Now that framework trestle ran down about as far as the middle of the marsh, where the marsh was deepest, and there the wood under the tracks was solid. There was marshy stuff, like moss, kind of, growing between the cracks in the boards, and the cat-tails were close in all around so we could hardly see what was under us. It was like that for maybe five hundred feet or so, and then the tracks were on a trestle again till they ran onto the solid land of Van Schlessenhoff’s field. We spent a couple of hours down there in Van Schlessenhoff’s field, digging the earth away from the old tracks. Now those tracks ended right close to the river. 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.”