“Oh dear!” cried Mrs. Brown.  “This is too bad!”

“Anybody hurt back there?” asked Mr. Brown, who, at the first feeling that something was wrong, had put on the brakes.  The automobile would have stopped anyhow, as the wheels were held fast in the mud and the broken pieces of the bridge.

“No, we’re all right,” answered Uncle Tad, looking at Bunny and Sue, who, at the first sound of something wrong had crept closer to their mother.

“My nose feels as if I had bumped it,” said Bunny, rubbing his “smeller” as he sometimes called it.  “Though I don’t remember doing it,” he went on.

“I guess you did it when you jumped out of your seat,” said his mother.  “We all jumped, it came so suddenly.”

“And I dropped my Teddy bear and Uncle Tad stepped on her,” murmured Sue with sorrow in her tones.  “Look, Uncle Tad, you’ve turned on her eyes!”

And, surely enough, the electric eyes of Sallie Malinda were glowing brightly.  Uncle Tad must have stepped on the switch button in the toy’s back and turned it on.

“But I guess she’s all right,” went on Sue, as she turned off the switch and then turned it on again to see that it was working as it should.  “You didn’t hurt her, Uncle Tad,” she said.

“I’m glad of that, Sue,” said the old soldier.  “Now I guess I’d better get around to see if I can help your father get the automobile out of the ditch.”

Dix and Splash, who had been racing up and down the road, came back, panting and with their long red tongues hanging out of their mouths, to see what the trouble was.  They looked at the ditched automobile with their heads on one side, and then sort of barked at one another.  It was as if Dix said: 

“Well, what do you think about it, Splash?  Do you think we had better stay here and help them?”

“Oh, I don’t see anything we can do,” answered Splash.  At least it seemed as if he spoke that way.  “Let’s keep on playing tag.”

And so the two dogs raced away.

“We do seem to be in a fix,” remarked Mr. Brown as he came as near as he could to the back of the automobile without getting into the ditch.

“What can we do?” asked Mrs. Brown, and her voice was anxious.

“We’ll soon see,” answered her husband.  “In the first place you had all better get out of the car.  I don’t know how long it may stand upright.  It may topple over if the water washes away more mud from under one wheel than from under another, and you’ll be better out than in.”

“But how are we going to get out?” asked Bunny.  “The back steps are all under water!”

And so they were.  When the bridge broke with the automobile the front wheels were off the wooden planks and on the road beyond, and the rear wheels went down when the bridge broke in the middle.  So the “Ark” was standing as though it had come to a sudden stop going up a steep hill, at the bottom of which was a brook.  The rear wheels, and all but the top one of the back steps were under water.