Ma Pettengill

by Harry Leon Wilson

These Steptoe cousins come from a family back in the East that was remote kin to mine and they looked me up in Red Gap when they come out into the great boundless West to carve out a name for themselves. About fifteen years ago they come. Ben was dark and short and hulky, with his head jammed down between his shoulders. Ed was blond and like a cat, being quick. Ben had a simple but emphatic personality, seeing what he wanted and going for it, and that never being more than one thing at a time. Ed was all over the place with his own aspirations and never anything long at a time; kind of a romantic temperament, or, like they say in stories, a creature of moods. He was agent for the Home Queen sewing machine when he first come out. But that didn't mean sewing machines was his life work. He'd done a lot of things before that, like lecturing for a patent-medicine professor and canvassing for crayon portraits with a gold frame, and giving lessons in hypnotism, and owning one-half or a two-headed pig that went great at county fairs.

Ben had come along the year before Ed and got a steady job as brakeman on the railroad, over on the Coeur d'Alene Branch. He told me he was going to make railroading his life work and had started in at the bottom, which was smart of him, seeing he'd just come off a farm. They probably wouldn't of let him start in at the top. Anyway, he was holding down his job as brakeman when Ed sailed in, taking orders for the Home Queen, and taking 'em in plenty, too, being not only persuasive in his methods but a wizard on this here sewing machine. He could make it do everything but play accompaniments for songs—hemming, tucking, frilling, fancy embroidering. He knew every last little dingus that went on it; things I certainly have never learned in all my life, having other matters on my mind. He'd take a piece of silk ribbon and embroider a woman's initials on it in no time at all, leaving her dead set to have this household treasure.

But Ed had tired of sewing machines, like he had of hypnotism and the double-headed Berkshire; and he never kept at anything a minute after it quit exciting him. Ben come down to Red Gap to see his cousin and they had quite a confab about what Ed should next take up for his life work. Ben said it was railroading for his, and some day he'd be a general manager, riding round in his private car and giving orders right and left, though nothing but a humble brakeman now, and finally he talked Ed into the same exalted ambitions. Ed said he had often wanted to ride in a private car himself, and if it didn't take too long from the time you started in he might give railroading a chance to show what it could do for him. Ben said all right, come over with him and he'd get him started as brakeman, with a fine chance to work up to the top.

So, after infesting a few more houses with the Home Queen, Ed went into his new profession. He told me, the last thing, that, even if he didn't stick till he got to the top, it was, anyway, a fine chance for adventure, which was really the thing he had come west of Chicago for. He said night and day he pined for adventure.

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.

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?