hain. Then his two
cars really started out looking for adventure.

Ed admits that he had the thrill of his life for seven miles. I guess his
wildest cravings for adventure was appeased for the time. He flattened
out at the rear end of the last car and let the scenery flash by. He said
afterward it looked just one blurred mess to him. His two cars dropped
the sixteen hundred and forty-five feet and made the seven-mile distance
in four and one-half minutes by standard railroad time. Ed was feeling
fairly good, never having rode so fast in his life before, and he was
hoping nothing serious would get in the way before the cars slowed up on
a level somewhere. He didn't have long to hope this. His cars struck a
frog at the upper end of the Wallace yard and left the track. The forward
ends plowed into the ground and the rear ends swung over. Ed was shot
through the air two hundred and thirty-five feet, as afterward measured
by a conscientious employee of the road, and landed in a dump of sawdust
by the ice house.

It seems Ben was working in the Wallace yard that day and was the first
man to look things over. He put a report on the wire promptly and had a
wrecking outfit there to minister to these two injured box cars, and a
gang of Swedes repairing the track in no time at all. Then someone with
presence of mind said they ought to look for Ed, and Ben agreed; so
everybody searched and they found him in this sawdust. He looked
extremely ruined and like this little adventure had effected structural
modifications in him. He certainly had been brought down out of control,
like Squat says, but he was still breathing; so they took him over to the
Wallace Hospital on a chance that he could be put together again, like a
puzzle. A doctor got to work and set a lot of bones and did much plain
and fancy sewing on Ed the adventurer.

So there he was, bedfast for about three months; but, of course, he begun
to enjoy his accident long before that--almost as soon as he come to, in
fact. It seemed to Ed that there had never been so good an accident as
that in the whole history of railroading, and he was the sole hero of it.
He passed his time telling the doctor all about it, and anyone else that
would drop in to listen: just how he felt when the cars started downhill;
how his whole past life flashed before him and just what he was thinking
about when the cars poured him off. He was remembering every second of it
by the time he was able to ge