But Ed had tired of sewing machines, like he had of hypnotism and the double-headed Berkshire; and he never kept at anything a minute after it quit exciting him.  Ben come down to Red Gap to see his cousin and they had quite a confab about what Ed should next take up for his life work.  Ben said it was railroading for his, and some day he’d be a general manager, riding round in his private car and giving orders right and left, though nothing but a humble brakeman now, and finally he talked Ed into the same exalted ambitions.  Ed said he had often wanted to ride in a private car himself, and if it didn’t take too long from the time you started in he might give railroading a chance to show what it could do for him.  Ben said all right, come over with him and he’d get him started as brakeman, with a fine chance to work up to the top.

So, after infesting a few more houses with the Home Queen, Ed went into his new profession.  He told me, the last thing, that, even if he didn’t stick till he got to the top, it was, anyway, a fine chance for adventure, which was really the thing he had come west of Chicago for.  He said night and day he pined for adventure.

He got his adventure right soon after the company’s pay roll was adorned with his name.  He’d been twisting up brakes on freight cars for ten days till the life looked tame to him, even with a private car at the end, and then all his wildest dreams of adventure was glutted in something like four minutes and thirty seconds.  On this eleventh day after he’d begun at the bottom he started to let two big freight cars loaded with concentrates down the spur track, from one of the mines at Burke, having orders to put ’em where the regular train for Wallace could pick ’em up.  Burke is seven miles up the canon from Wallace and the grade drops two hundred and thirty-five feet to the mile, being a masterpiece of engineering.  Ed gets his two cars to the main line, all right, whistling a careless ditty.  Then when they should of stopped they did not.  They kept sneaking and creaking along on him.  He couldn’t get the brake of the forward car up very tight, and in setting the brake of the rear car, with a brakeman’s stick for a lever, he broke the chain.  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.