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.” 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.” “All right,” we all shouted, “let’s go!”