We dangled the movie apparatus down and the fellows took it in through the window. Then they came out on the platform and helped the kid and me down. That was a pretty hard job, believe _me_. Just as we got our feet on terra what d'ye call it.--I mean terra cotta[A]--that Latin for platform--anyway, you know what I mean--as soon as we got our two feet (I mean four feet) on the platform, the two men with lanterns had just reached it. One of the men said, "What's all this? What are you doing here, anyway? Who are you?" Gee whiz, it sounded like an examination paper. Whenever we get mixed up with grown-up people it's usually me--I mean _I_--that has to do the talking. Pee-wee usually helps though. So I gave the men our regular motto. I said, "We're here because we're here. Ask me something easy. This is the Comedy of Errors." I said that because we have the Comedy of Errors in school and I just happened to think of it. I guess the man was the fireman; anyway, he had on a jumper. He walked into the car and looked all around with his lantern and the other man looked all around, too, trying to size us up, I guess. The fireman said, "Comedy of Errors, huh?" Pee-wee said, "Sure, that's in Shakespeare." "Well, it's mighty gol darn lucky you had a movie machine along," the fireman said. "You youngsters have had a _mighty narrow_ escape." "Why shouldn't it be a narrow escape?" Connie said. "It's a narrow bridge. Anyway, where do we go from here?" "There's a couple of men lying on the top of one of your cars, too," Pee-wee said; "we could see them by the light." "Tramps, I guess," the brakeman said. He didn't seem to be surprised. So then we told them all about how it was with us--our adventures with the car and all that. They said we had a bad coupling and that it was no wonder it had parted. "We should worry," I told him; "scouts stick together, even if couplings part. But anyway, we'd like to get off this bridge." The fireman said it wouldn't be a bad idea. FOOTNOTE: [Footnote A: He probably meant terra firma.] CHAPTER XXIX "FOILED" Pretty soon they went back to the train and then, after about ten minutes, the engine began puffing and coming toward us ever so slow. It seemed as if it hardly moved. "I think we're going to get a good bunk in the nose," Wig said. "Good night," I told him; "I hope it doesn't pick up speed." "I'd rather see it pick up anything than that," Connie said. "Suppose it had hit us at full speed," Pee-wee said. "It would have been a home run all right," I told him. Even with that locomotive just creeping along toward us, it scared me. It seemed as if it couldn't touch our car without banging it into splinters. But that engineer knew what he was doing all right. The train came along so slowly you could hardly tell it was moving, and sometimes it stopped and started again. Pee-wee said it was going scout pace. But it was more like a snail's pace, I guess.