OK, got it.
And I see now how unclear the sentence is. I want to have the answer-to-the-question part in there, so perhaps I should word it like this:
I was riding over a frozen foot/bike bridge in Michigan, and I was thinking, Will I fall if I put on the brakes? I couldn’t resist trying it, touched the brakes, and down I went. So I got the answer to my question: yes.
Better or too wordy?
In that rewrite, I would have put my thoughts in quotes too, but I learned that quotes would be wrong, and italics are acceptable, although not ideal. In this case, I want them in order to have a clear question/answer pair. Gets complicated, huh?
Thanks for the help,
Al