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_. CHAPTER XXXII—BZZZZZZ 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. Now Mr. Jenson moved his locomotive very slowly past where Slausen’s used to stand, and right across Willow Place. It pushed our car ever so little. The brakeman stood on the front platform of our car and stopped it with the brakes. He said they worked pretty good. Then the locomotive pushed the car about a couple of hundred feet so as to give it a good start, and then backed away from it. We all stood there shouting, “Hurrah!” “All aboard for Van Schlessenhoff’s field!” The brakeman was the only one on the car. Now this is just exactly what happened. The car moved along into the marsh and pretty soon we could only see the upper part of it on account of the cat-tails. When it got to about the middle of the marsh it stopped. We followed along the tracks and when we got to where the car was, the brakeman said he had slowed it down because the trestle was shaky and he was afraid it would give way. He had slowed the car down too much and it had stopped. He said he was sorry, but he had to go back to his train. So there was our car, right in the middle of Cat-tail Marsh, with the cat-tails growing up close all around it, and the mosquitoes mobilizing for a grand drive. We knew Mr. Jenson couldn’t help us any more, because that trestle would never hold his big locomotive. “This is a nice fix we’re in,” Westy said. “We’ll be eaten up here.” “What do we care?” Pee-wee shouted. As long as there was some question of eats it didn’t make any difference to him where we were. I said, “I’m not talking about you eating; I’m talking about the mosquitoes. Wait till the sun goes down, there’ll be nothing left of us, if we stay here.” “Well, let’s be thankful the car didn’t go down, anyway,” one of the fellows said. “Sure, it might be worse,” another one of them shouted. I said, “Oh, sure, this is a fine place for a scout headquarters. There’s only one better place that I know of and that’s on top of a volcano.” “Can we go on top of a volcano?” the inventor wanted to know. “Not this afternoon,” I told him.