Fortunately, after our steamy wait for the ceremony, theme park karma smiled on us. Crystal, the CM driving Main Street's 1905 Horseless Carriage, stopped in front of Cinderella Castle to let off some passengers, and after we explained our mission, she kindly allowed us to stay on for the required round-trip on a Main Street Vehicle. With Step 23 down, we made our way back to Frontierland.
Unfortunately, it took our raft driver nearly five minutes to dock at Tom Sawyer Island. It was painful: we could easily have lept from the raft to the shore, but had to wait behind the rope net while she backed up and pulled in, over and over. With our feet finally on firm soil, we checked our watch for Step 24, spending 15 minutes on the Island.
We made our required stop at Fort Langhorn (and got a pretty great self-photo, if I do say so), Step 25, and even headed into the escape tunnel. [Note: I agree, Len. Disney could never get away with building this today.] We made it through, in spite of Mike's mild claustrophobia. A run across the barrel bridge completed our visit. While we waited for the the raft back to Frontierland, we heard the whistle of the Walt Disney World Railroad, our next step. We were certain that meant the train was leaving the station, so we looked at our list while making the raft voyage back, and tried to figure out how best to skip that step.
Fortunately, we saw the train was still there as we came up onto the pathway outside Splash Mountain. We made our first of only two sprints, and caught the train just as the engineer yelled, "All aboard!"