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. 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.