"After starting the car down to the wreck I won't let it get away from
me, but catch it and set the brakes and ride it wild to the bottom."
"Why be such a fool as that?" demands Regan.
"'T is on account of promising Mr. Craney to manage the Suburban till he
gets back," explains Tim.
It strikes home to Regan that this is the crisis of his life, and Tim
feels his wrath as the toss of tempest. 'T would be an easy matter to
kidnap the boy here an' now, and send his own agent to wreck the car,
but even then the scheme is blocked. Tim must be accounted for
afterward. The boy must see his passengers and tell of the accident or
there will be search made for him under the wreckage, and talk in the
papers, reminding the town of the Suburban's existence, and Regan's
enemies that a charter is about to be forfeited.
"Hold!" says Regan to Tim at the door. "My word I'll not touch you
again," and the boy drops his hands from his neck, all but wrung by a
shake of the madman pacing the car. Yet his gaze lies level and clear
and there is a steadiness to the bedraggled front which baffles Regan,
such assurance being beyond nature in a boy.
"Whist!" he says warily, understanding somehow that nothing is to be
gained here by argument or threats; "since you were fool enough to bind
yourself with a promise, hold your tongue till I can find Craney."
"'T will hold," promises Tim.
Down past the terminal and out the Suburban track, bedraggled and
undaunted, stalks the vagabond along the way of knowledge. Nor does he
look up till coming on faithful old Charley, who has found his way back
to the car and stands waiting to be hitched. Tim halts, surveying him
knowingly.
"Faith, Charley, she was a wise one," he says.
From that hour he takes up the plod of duty, keening in that little
minor whistle which all car drivers pick up from the wind and drumming
of hoofbeats on frozen ground. And he is always on time in every
weather, so that presently the lime burners relent and joke him, and
Katy in pity for the outcast would pat his cheek friendlily--but never
an encouragement do they receive from Tim standing at his brake and
speaking sternly to Charley, meager and windbitten but unconquerable by
humor or kindness as he has been by threat and danger.
All day a bright rage chars the bony breast; at evening it smolders as
if having no more fuel in the wasted body. Yet Tim sits cross-legged
with old sacks folded round him, staring unwaveringly into the
loneliness. And from his boyhood's ashes he resurrects with terrific
will and fearlessness the great things which had been born within him;
in fact he craves and will have no company but them, torment him as they
will. He reflects with derision that the lime burners and Katy do not
understand what goes on within him. But Regan would understand! How the
great things in that man would have raged if he had bound them tight and
fast with a promise. Regan was not such a fool.
"Never again do I promise the duty," says Tim.
The wise old woman had warned him that what a person promises that must
he do, but like a fool he had not profited by the warning.
Even in his ignorance the vagabond understands much of Molly. In his
first musings on these subjects the night of Dan's coming to bargain
with him for the wreck of the car he had foolishly torn up the page she
had written over.
He had torn up that fragment of message because the memory of the cozy
room and hearth fire had tempted his thoughts away from these hardships
and loneliness; he resented Molly's smile and welcome as an attempt to
lure him from the way of ambition, much as the pity of Katy and
good-humor of the lime burners would do. Now he understood that Molly
offered no such temptation; that to herself the fire and comforts were
as nothing; far away and beyond these had dwelt her thoughts in some
place as lonely and echoing as the old terminal. There in wisdom and
sorrow she had pondered her duty; how to keep the promise she had made.
"Dam' luck, she had," Tim Cannon swears roundly. Of course she had also
been a fool to bind herself with a promise; but to die before she had
found a way to keep it was harder still, somehow.
As for himself--his only duty is to manage Craney's road till he
returns. After that the things within him can be let loose, and many
exploits be expected of them.
"And if Craney does not come back! Sure," sneers Tim to the dark and
loneliness, "I'll be no worse than the old dame who died on the job!"
One day Katy speaks of returning to town for the winter, and he tells
her sternly that the road is run for her convenience and she is expected
to ride on it.
And so she continues to do, without further argument about returning to
town; and he is mildly interested in the journeys she makes after that,
on Sunday afternoons. To the old Craney homestead she journeys and sits
on the doorstep, sometimes speaking of the young man who has left his
railroad to be run for her sake, and then wandered away with his coat
wrong side out in search of fortune.
"Never a bit of encouragement did I give him," she will always conclude,
with blushes; "but when he returns his welcome will not be the same I
would offer a stranger."
Once she thanks Tim for attending his trust so faithfully, but he does
not reply. It is not worth while; she could not understand--that he does
this thing because it is promised and inevitable, not because he
relishes it.
As Craney's orders are to arrange the Sunday schedule to Katy's
convenience he sits erect on a stone, watching from a distance till she
starts toward the car. The things within him burn and torment, and keep
him company; he will not let them go or even quiet them by promises of
what he will achieve when this duty is done and off his hands. Instead
he holds them at bay, coldly.
Till one Sunday afternoon a message mutters out of the northern sky;
from Regan it comes, shaking the very ground which the vagabond, as if
understanding it, grips in his nervous fingers. "'T is like the guns in
battle," he says, and that night strolling among the men up the yard
learns that the roar is that of dynamite where the construction gangs of
Regan's new line are breaching the distant hills for entrance into Great
Southwest territory.
Regan is coming on, undaunted by the refusal of Barlow to let him
through; day by day the iron rumor swells in the northern sky, and Tim
sleeping or waking presses close after the vision of a giant of bronze
with half-lidded smoldering eyes who juggles men and steel in the
burning dusk beyond the construction camps.
Defiant of the winter winds, even to refusing the jacket which Katy buys
for him, he shivers with the chill of exhaustion, for now he must
struggle the more fiercely with ambition, night and day. Yet on he
plods, keening in that strange little whistle. All this bleak stretch of
his history he crosses, in a sort of delirium loading the battered old
car with company of the make-believe kind whom he has watched the
children in the city parks playing with long ago. The ghost of a
jack-in-the-box which he had once dragged away from a playground and
murdered with a stick in his den appears by night in the terminal
building. It smiles forgivingly and he frowns back.
When the snow falls he marches ahead of Charley, a shovel on his
shoulder, storming the drifts. A rope round his body keeps the whipping
rags together, and he wears an old sack for a waistcoat. The limekiln
closes down and there is no passenger left but Katy, so Tim breaks into
the treasure holes in the wall to buy oats and bread. Once again the
Barlow Suburban is devouring its master. And now the rumble of dynamite
sinks lower and lower like the death rattle of Regan's destiny and one
afternoon dies away entirely.
That night Tim sits cross-legged on his pallet by his rusty little
stove, awe-stricken, as if somehow a battle waited on him. And out of
that dread stillness under the northern sky Regan comes to him, streaked
red with the clay of the camps.
"Craney is lost or dead," he says. "I have searched high and low; now it
is up to you."
The boy listening intently agrees with Regan. "'T is too bad I promised
Craney and have the duty."
"You are far from a fool," says Regan; "look out of the window here with
me." And as they stare up the yards, awink with the colored lamps of the
switch stands: "Do you see the giant black engines and cars, and the
shops beyond with their roaring mountains of machinery; the tracks
stretching thousands of miles, all swarming with trains and men? Such
are the playthings of me; have you a game which can beat that? Listen."
He holds up his hand, and out of the simmering dusk rises the groan of
iron and steam and toil. "It is marching music like the bands of
armies," says Regan. "D' you understand? You must; you can feel it! Such
armies I command and will bring you up in the way of commanding if you
but keep the bargain you made."
"Is it walk off the duty, you mean?" asks Tim astonished.
"But listen again, as man to man," says Regan, patient and crafty and
desperate. "I have no way into Barlow, bold as I have been in building
to its very walls. A few crooks who run the town keep me out. My end of
track is now a mile from the Barlow limits on the north, and there as if
I had given up hope I have bought land for depots and set engineers to
work laying out yards, and masons raising foundations. By building in
from the north I have not called my enemies' attention to the Suburban,
which enters from the southeast; nobody has even thought of it as my
means of breaking in. But if you will carry out the deal you made with
me," says Regan, "I will own the Suburban and throw my rails from the
present end of track to the Suburban right of way and into this town in
a single night! Think over it well; on this spot where you sit among
tumbledown walls you will raise up"--the man's tones thrilled like a
prophecy--"you will raise up a station of stone and glass. The sounds in
here, instead of running mice and the pawing of the old horse and your
own curses on poverty, will be the footsteps of hurrying people, their
laughs and cries of welcome and godspeed. Ah, Timothy," breathes Regan,
"think well!"
But Timothy, wilder and gaunter than ever, sets his teeth. "'T would be
walkin' off the duty."
Dan Regan grinds out the word after him. "Duty! What is this, I ask of
you, but duty? The duty to thousands of people who want this road in
Barlow, instead of duty to one man, Craney, who has set you to guard a
thing he does not want and has deserted himself? He will never come
back. Now ask what you want of me. The price, whatever it is! And where
do you come by this false notion of duty?" he demands with an
inspiration.
"'T was an old woman--she was the wise one," says Tim, and explains, as
in confidence, about his visit to the cottage on that snowy night. "She
was putting it into a message," he says, "but her hand was too old and
shaky--and I did not know my letters to write it for her. She had a
beginning all blotted and scratched--I brought it away, and tore it up
the first night you came here. The Farthest Lantern, it was. Here is the
pen she broke by stabbing into the table, she was that mad!"
The Farthest Lantern!
Remotely Dan Regan hears the word, with a little shock, as a challenge
whispered in darkness; he shrugs his shoulders.
"Come, Timothy," he urges.
Now memory has seized on the word, sending it echoing through his brain;
but he goes on, impatient of the start which Tim has given him, and not
yet realizing how it was done.
"Will you help those crooks of Barlow against myself and all the good
people of the town? Will you cheat Craney of the price of his road in
case he ever comes back? Is this duty? I tell you, no!" And in a flash
of afterthought: "The wise old woman herself would cry 'No' from the
grave of her. I tell you as one who knows. For she was Regan's mother,
and her message of the things she saw beyond the day's work at
Turntable--was to me!"
With terrible fascination Tim gazes at the man racked by the old powers
of pull-down and trample-under, which Tim himself holds imprisoned in
Regan's breast. And as the last words drive home the vagabond answers,
high and clear: "Sure, you must know then. Tell me true, Mr. Regan--'t
will not be breaking the promise?"
Through the dingy panes in the corner wink the lights as did those of
Turntable long ago; but they do not beckon.
"I will ditch the car now," says Tim.
"I might be mistaken----" Regan's voice is hollow; the memories of a
lifetime cloud his vision. "Perhaps you would do well not to trust me,"
he says; the warning of a hypocrite to satisfy his startled conscience
as once more his gaze lifts bold and far along the road which lies
through the corner guarded by this scarecrow of a boy.
"Sure, I trust you," answers Tim in that singing voice the likes of
which was never heard out of him before, and ties his tatters round him
against the cold outside. The promise has been kept, the duty done, he
is at last on the road with Regan.
The man holds the pen in his hand--the pen his mother had tried to write
her last, her life's message with, and failed. Fearfully he gazes on
this gaunt campaigner of destiny, delivering his unspoken message by
deed and bearing and duty done, through storm and danger, indifferent to
bribe and threat.
But now this Tim Cannon nods and is on his way like any credulous boy to
clear the highway of fortune for Regan, by the wreck of the Suburban
car.
"Hold!" Regan's head is bowed and he is listening. "No, I cannot pass
here," he answers in thought, and in a strained, quiet voice tells Tim:
"You trust me too late."
The miracle of Molly's messenger has not been worked in vain.
Light had broken in flashes from the vagabond's countenance since the
great things within him were set free to join this mighty partnership.
Halted now in his tracks he listens too, gloomily, wrathfully hearing in
fact what Regan does not--a quickening footfall, the tug at the latch,
the rumble of the door. Craney comes in.
He is almost as gaunt as Tim and covered with the grime on the road.
"What? Are you not yet swallowed up by the cursed Suburban?" he asks,
astonished. "Then you will give me word of Katy O'Hare, and I am gone by
the through freight. Fortune was not in the direction I took," he adds
by way of explaining; "so I am beating up west and south; 't is a far
search and leaves me little time between trains."
"There is time enough!" Regan has him by the arm. "You are Craney of the
Suburban. Come!"
And so terrible is the grip he is fallen into that Mr. Craney is dragged
out and through the dark with hardly perceptible struggle.
Tim Cannon watches them out with ghastly nonchalance; once more fortune
has declared against him and he takes his loss, biding only Craney's
return to throw up his job and be gone.
The night passes and a faint iron rumor drifts down from the northern
sky where the P. D. construction gangs are breaking camp; then a boom of
dynamite. The campaign is on again; no need of concealment now, the
Suburban has passed safely into Regan's hands.
The red coal in the rusty stove crumbles, the lantern smokes out.
"I was just too late; 't is little I know," thinks Tim Cannon.
A burly battered man enters the door and leads out the horse; the gang
at his heels attack the old building with pick and bar; to a ripping of
shingles the dawn twinkles through; the battle which the outcast had
halted so long is passing over his body.
The battered man shakes the iron bar in his hand, pointing it
significantly at walls and roof tumbling about; Tim looks at him
scornfully, and the gang tear at the flooring with picks and axes.
Why it is so, I cannot say, who make no pretense of sorcery, but 't is
certain that the mice linger and spiders swing low from the rafters with
presentiment of tragedy as Tim Cannon stands his last guard in the
corner of the doomed old terminal. Twice he catches glimpses of Regan
without, compelling this storm of men and steel.
The floor is now torn up to his very feet; the far end of the building,
roof and walls, has been scattered like chaff. Indifferently Tim watches
the battered man point to him with the iron bar and waits calmly to be
dragged away by the gang.
Mr. Craney running lightly along the last remaining girder to Tim's
corner presses some folded bills and a paper into his hand.
"Salary and honorable discharge," he explains; "and invitation to the
wed----"
And his voice being smothered by a great crash within and without he
signals with his hands that not a moment is to be lost in saving
themselves alive.
Above all the uproar is a shriller yell, a rush of staggering men past
the end of the terminal, a heavy clang of steel; fighting. "Regan is
crossing the Great Southwest main!" shrieks Mr. Craney over his
shoulder.
In fact the P. D. frog for the main-line crossing is set in only after a
sharp skirmish with a G. S. force rushed up to prevent it. And then
Regan, threatened with police and military by his gathering enemies,
passes them the court order obtained during the night. By this order
they are enjoined from tearing up the frog, even before it has been laid
down! Such is the forethought of genius.
Regan's special, ordered out since midnight, stands drumming up the
line, and Tim lurking in his corner sees the signal he gives as he
crosses the track. The special glides down between them, and once more
the vagabond watches through the flying dust clouds the flash of Regan's
car, signaling farewell.
Now he is free to pick and choose where he will, but Tim Cannon girds
his rags with fierce regret; the great things within him cling to this
spot; he cannot break away, and he curses in a cold agony of
disappointment.
"I was too late. Never again will I promise the duty."
"You gang boss!" crashes a voice behind him; "breach me the wall at the
corner."
And the battered man and his crew fly at it with pick and bar.
With twisted face and hand clenched on his breast the boy stares at
Regan, who has just sent his car home without boarding it at all.
"My path lies through this corner; last night you blocked it; to-day I
will pass."
'T is a poor sort of triumph over the vagabond, whose body straightens
and stiffens proudly.
"Which I never could do with you on guard! Come; first through the
breach, Timothy! 'T is your right. Now we are through--catch stride here
in fortune's highway. You are on duty with Dan Regan!"
This queer sentimental thing the man does in honor of his mother's
messenger, and never again through all the years is the spell broken
which draws the man of pull-down and trample-under away and upward to
the things which the pretty colleen of long agone saw beyond the day's
work at Turntable. 'T is little we know.