it and eat his heart out with envy, either
before or after what was going to happen to him.

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 anyth