The fat young man reached the front platform. He was not only fat. He was also very strong.
“Here, let me run this old shebang?” he asked Jimmie. “I won’t kill anybody.”
“Well, we’re in the open now,” said Jimmie. “I guess you can’t do much damage.” So he gave him the controller and joined the vocalists.
Minutes passed by to the lilt and swing of such grand old classics as _The Bulldog and the Bullfrog_, and the rest of it, with xylophone accompaniment, accomplished by drawing a cane across the rods in the backs of the seats.
Never had happiness so untrammeled an occupancy. Number 809 spread her long wheels in the ecstasy of freedom. Her motors purred. She passed the high points with loving pats, scarcely touching them. Her inhabitants were carried away.
And then, like a handful of mud upon the merriment fell the roar of the man at the controller. He was grinding frantically at the brake. The huge muscles of his back had split his coat in the effort.
The party got up and saw ahead of them a sharp incline, ending in an unprotected bridge.
“Gee-rusalem!” bawled Jimmie suddenly. “Wood’s Bridge--the worst in the country. I forgot it.”
At that instant a crack, followed by the jingle of metal, told them that the brake-chain was broken. The car, which had slacked a little of its speed, leaped forward again.
“Turn off your power! Reverse, I mean!” yelled Jimmie.
Then came a thudding sound on the car’s roof.
Near that bridge, a few feet from the side of the track, there was a long haystack.
“Farmers to the front!” said Tommie. “Every man to the step, and jump!”
In a twinkling twelve young men rolled along a haystack. They rolled and rolled. They gathered much hay, but, still dominant above the mischance, the souls of ten foot-ball players and two trolley men rose triumphant. They wanted to see the last of 809.
She took the rest of the grade like a bucking bronco. She hit the bridge like an avalanche. Something gave way, or held too strongly, for 809 sprang into the air, turned completely over and went down in thirty feet of dirty water, trucks up, with a tremendous splash.
“Beyond recall,” assented the mechanical engineer.
The college men said nothing, but, as the thin procession topped the hill two miles away, the fat man led by twenty yards.