He gets to Wallace on the noon train and finds that Ben with his officials has gone up the canon, past Burke, on the president’s private car, to return in about an hour.  After Ed’s inquiries the agent kindly wires up to Ben that his cousin from Arizona is waiting for him.  Ed spends the time walking round Ben’s shabby little private car and sneering at it.  He has his plans all made, now that he has run his man to earth.  He won’t pull anything rough before the officials, but about twenty miles out on the line is a siding with a shipping corral beside it and nothing else in sight but vistas.  They’ll get an engine to run the two cars out there that night and leave ’em, and everything can be done decently and in order.  No hurry and no worry and no scandal.

Ed is just playing the coming fight over in his mind for the fifth time, correcting some of his blows here and there, when he hears a whistle up the canon and in comes the special.  The officials pile off and Ben comes rushing up to Ed with a glad smile and effusive greetings and hearty slaps on the back; and how is everything, old man?—­and so on—­with a highly worried look lurking just back of it all; and says what rare good luck to find Ed here, because he’s the very man they been talking about all the way down from Burke.

Ed says if they come down as fast as he did one time they didn’t get a chance to say much about him; but Ben is introducing him to the president of the road and the general manager and the chief engineer and three or four directors, and they all shake hands with him till it seems like quite a reception.  The president says is this really the gentleman who has made that last big strike in Arizona!  And if it is he knows something still more interesting about him, because he has just listened to a most remarkable tale of his early days as a brakeman on this very line.  Their division superintendent has been telling of his terrific drop down the canon and his incredible flight through the air of three hundred and thirty-five feet.

“How far did he say I was hurled?” says Ed, and the president again says three hundred and thirty-five feet, which was a hundred more than Ed had ever claimed; so he looks over at Ben pretty sharp.

Ben is still talking hurriedly about the historic accident, saying that in all his years of railroad experience he never heard of anything approaching it, and if they will step up the track a piece he will show them just where the cars left the rails.  Ben must of done a lot of quick thinking that day.  He had the bunch over to see the exact spot, and they all stood and looked over to the ice house and said it was incredible; and a director from Boston said it was perfectly preposterous; really now!  And Ben kept on reciting rapidly about the details.  He said Ed had come down the seven miles in less than three minutes, which was lopping a minute and a half off the official time; and that when picked up he hadn’t a whole bone left in his body, which was also a lie; and that his cousin never could of survived if he hadn’t probably had the most marvellous constitution a man was ever endowed with.  He then made the bunch go over to the ice house to see the other exact spot, and they looked back to where he started from, and again said it was incredible and preposterous.