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 the bottom now, serving as a weight to hold the 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 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 he had stood at the tiller of the “Swallow” in the storm.

No such thing as stopping them.

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

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

And it was very stupid indeed for the driver of that one-horse “truck wagon” to try and reach the narrow little 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 grazed one another 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 hind wheels and that truck wagon would have to find its path 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 nearly enough of it.  Then it was that Dab used his whip again, and the streets of the village were traversed at such a rate as to call for the disapprobation of all sober-minded people.

“Here we are, Ham, greens and all.”

“Did they run far?” asked Ham, quietly.

CHAPTER XXIV

The boys had returned a good deal sooner than had been expected, but they made no more trouble.  As Ford Foster remarked, they were all “willing to go slow for a week” after being carried so very fast by Dab Kinzer’s ponies.