"This is the Terminal Building," explains Mr. Craney as they come up, "of the Barlow Suburban Railway." And he points out the sagging track of rust-eaten rails which wanders away across the town's outskirts. "In here," he explains, escorting Tim up the incline of the platform and through the sliding door of the wareroom, "we have a stall for the motive power, which is a horse, and in the corner a cot for the general manager, who drives him. 'T is only three runs must be made daily across pleasant hills and fields and then a hearty supper when you collect fares enough to pay for it, and an infant's sleep here rocked by the trains as they pass. Then up in the morning in jolly good time to get the limekiln workers on the job by seven. Observe, young hobo," he says, "that I keep nothing up my sleeve. The job is here for you to take or leave, for better or worse; and I throw in this cap with the gold braid," he says, unwrapping one of the bundles he carries.
"Gimme it," replies Tim with decision; and the suburban car arriving at the moment, the driver turns in thirty-five cents as the day's revenue, and Mr. Craney pays him seventy cents as wages and discharges him with thanks.
"You are now installed, young manager, and so on," he tells Tim; and after presenting the cap with gold braid, which comes down over his manager's ears, he shows him how to reverse the horse and work the combination of the harness, which is woven of wire and rope and old trunk straps.
"All aboard, Barlow Suburban!" he calls then, so quickly that a young lady passenger must run the last few steps and be assisted into the car by himself.
"You will be most active as superintendent of motive power," he shouts to Tim as he dusts the bony nag with the reins, and the battered little car bumps along. "Old Charley is an heirloom who has come down to me along of the cursed railway," he explains.
"Do not frighten away the gadfly which is his train dispatcher or he will sit down in the track till the whistle blows."
Further instructions he gives also, and they have gone about a mile out into the fields when the young lady passenger having dropped her fare into the box rings the bell and is helped off at a wild-rose bush where a path leads over a hill to a farmhouse.
"Sweet creature," says Mr. Craney with gloom. "Drive on!" And never a word more does he speak till they reach the end of the line and the house where he lives alone. "We are total strangers," he explains then, "though she has boarded at the farmhouse half the summer and is named Katy O'Hare and is telephone lady in town."
When Tim asks why Katy O'Hare and himself do not become acquainted: "'T is the fatal circumstances of me," he answers; and invites his official to dinner, unwrapping his other bundle.
The cheap old cottage is also fallen upon fatal circumstances, with shutters and panes broken and seams of its walls opening to the weather; the barns and sheds are but heaps of boards, and the crooked, rusty switch seems but a fork of lightning which has so wrecked and blackened the whole Craney homestead that Tim's rags are an ornament to it. And yet Mr. Craney snaps his fingers and dances a jig. "Now ruin and mortgage may swallow you as it has me," he says with ridicule, and knocks some splinters from the house to build a fire in the yard between four bricks which he knocks from the chimney.