Then, indeed, as the ponies kicked and reared and plunged, he thought he saw something work out from under their collars, and fall to the ground.  An acorn-burr is just the thing to worry a restive horse, if put in such a place; but Joe and Fuz had hardly expected their “little joke” to be so very successful as it was.

The ponies were off now!

“Joe,” shouted Fuz, “let’s jump!”

“Don’t let ’em, Ford,” exclaimed Dab, giving his whole energies to the horses.  “They’ll break their necks if they do.  Hold ’em in.”

Ford, who was in the middle, promptly seized an arm of each of his panic-stricken cousins, while Frank clambered over the seat to help him.  They were all down on the bottom now, serving as a, weight to hold the evergreen branches, as the light wagon bounced and rattled along over the smooth, level road.

In vain Dab pulled and pulled at the ponies.  Run they would, and run they did; and all he could do was to keep them fairly in the road.

Bracing strongly back, with the reins wound around his tough hands, and with a look in his face that should have given courage even to the Hart boys, Dab strained at his task as bravely as when he had stood at the tiller of “The Swallow” in the storm.

There was no such thing as stopping those ponies.

And now, as they whirled along, even Dabney’s face paled a little.

“I must reach the bridge before he does:  he’s just stupid enough to keep right on.”

It was very “stupid,” indeed, for the driver of that one-horse “truck-wagon” to try and reach the little narrow unrailed bridge first.  It was an old, used-up sort of a bridge, at best.

Dab loosened the reins a little, but could not use his whip.

“Why can’t he stop!”

It was a moment of breathless anxiety, but the wagoner kept stolidly on.  There would be barely room to pass him on the road itself; none at all on the narrow bridge.

The ponies did it.

They seemed to put on an extra touch of speed on their own account, just then.

There was a rattle, a faint crash; and then, as the wheels of the two vehicles almost touched each other in passing, Ford shouted,—­

“The bridge is down!”

Such a narrow escape!

One of the rotten girders, never half strong enough, had given way under the sudden shock of the hinder wheels; and that truck-wagon would have to find its road across the brook as best it could.

There were more wagons to pass, as they plunged forward, and rough places in the road for Dabney to look out for; but even Joe and Fuz were now getting confidence in their driver.  Before long, too, the ponies themselves began to feel that they had had enough of it.  Then it was that Dab used his whip again, and the streets of the village were traversed at a rate to call for the disapprobation of all sober-minded people.

“Here we are, Ham!  Greens and all.”