t on crutches. He never used that old saying
about making a long story short.

First thing he did when he could hobble was to take a man from the
resident engineer's office out to the point where he'd left the rails and
tape his flight, finding it to be two hundred and thirty-five feet. That
hurt his story, because he had been estimating it at five hundred feet;
but he was strictly honest and accepted the new figures like a little
man.

That night Ben come in, who'd been up round Spokane mostly since the
accident, and Ed told him all about it; how his flight was two hundred
and thirty-five feet. And wasn't it the greatest accident that ever
happened to anybody?

Ed noticed that Ben didn't seem to be excited about it the way he had
ought to be. He was sympathetic enough for Ed's bone crashes, but he said
it was all in the day's work for a railroad man; and he told Ed about
some other accidents that was right in a class along with his and mebbe
even a shade better. Ed was peeved at this; so Ben tried to soothe him.
He said, yes, indeed, all hands had been lucky--especially the company.
He said if them two cars hadn't happened to strike soft ground that took
the wheels they'd been smashed to kindling; whereas the damage was
trifling. This sounded pretty cold to Ed. He said this railroad company
didn't seem to set any exaggerated value on human life. Ben said no
railroad company could let mere sentiment interfere with business if it
wanted to pay dividends, and most of them did. He said it was a matter of
dollars and cents like any other business, and Ed had already cost 'em a
lot of good hard cash for doctor's bills. Then he admitted that the
accident had been a good thing for him, in a way, he being there on the
spot and the first to make a report over to the superintendent at Tekoa.

"I bet you made a jim-dandy good report," says Ed, taking heart again
after this sordid dollars-and-cents talk. "It was certainly a fine chance
to write something exciting if a man had any imagination. You probably
won't have another chance like that in all your career."

"My report pleased the Old Man all right," says Ben. "He's kind of had
his eye on me ever since. He said the way I worded that report showed I
wasn't one to lose my head and get hysterical, the way he had known some
green hands to do."

"I'll certainly have to have a look at that report," says Ed. "Probably
you did get a little bit hysterical at that seeing there was