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 get 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.