“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 lots of excuse for it.”

Ben says no, he can’t remember that he was hysterical any, because the high-class railroad man must always keep his head in emergencies.  Ed says, anyway he knows it must of been a corking good report, and he’ll sure have a look at it when he gets to stepping again.

All the same, it begun to look to Ed like his accident wasn’t being made enough of.  It come over him gradually.  Of course he’d got to be an old story round the hospital and people was beginning to duck when he started talking.  Then, after he got on crutches he’d hobble about the fatal spot, pointing out his route to parties that would stay by him, and getting ’em to walk over two hundred and thirty-five feet to where he was picked up lifeless.  And pretty soon even this outside trade fell off.  And right after that he begun to meet new trainmen and others that had never heard a word about the accident and looked at him like they thought he was a liar when he told the details.  He was coming to be a grouchy nuisance round Wallace.  Even the doctor said he’d be glad when Ed got entirely well again.

Ed couldn’t understand it.  He must of thought the company should stop all trains for five minutes every day at the hour of his mix-up, or at the very least that the president of the road and the board of directors ought to come down in a special car and have their pictures taken with him; and a brass tablet should be put up on the ice house, showing where his lifeless carcass was recovered.  And of course they would send him a solid gold engraved pass, good for life between all stations on all divisions.  But these proper attentions was being strangely withheld.  So far as Ed could see, the road had gone right on doing business as usual.

He couldn’t understand it at all.  It seemed like he must be dreaming.  He wrote to Ben, who was still up the line, that this here fine report he had made must of got lost; anyway, it seemed like the company had never got round to reading it or they wouldn’t have took things so placid.  By now he was pinning all his hopes to this report of Ben’s if any justice was going to be done him in this world.  He’d tell parties who doubted his story that he guessed they’d believe him fast enough if they ever got an eye on Ben’s report, which was made on the spot, and was so good a report, though not hysterical, that it had drawn compliments from the division superintendent.