"Sure, the horse is like I used to be with my old man; when I was hungry I was afraid of being starved and kicked; but after I had been starved and kicked I was not afraid of going hungry or of the old man either."
'T is live and let live we must, so he feeds Charley just little enough to keep him afraid of getting still less, which is the secret of all contented relations between employer and employed, y' understand.
Only a short time afterward Tim raises the car fare to ten cents, recking little of the lime burners' wrath and the high glances of Katy O'Hare at the hard little face and hunched ragged body as he drives on, clenching the reins in his fists. Divil a bit does he seek their goodwill or anybody's, knowing that there is profit to be made only from the fear that people have of him as they have of Regan.
At evening when he makes bold to stroll through the yards among the roadmen some tale of Regan will send him scurrying back light-hearted to the old terminal to count his money, hidden in a can behind some loose bricks in the wall.
"Buy and sell and trample them all, I will, some day," he says, and dances a banshee dance with shuffling feet and flinging arms. The spiders—who are all misers—glare down on him with a poison joy, and hasten to spin a web over the cranny where the can of treasure is buried. "No thief will suspect what is hidden there now," says Tim; and opens another deposit in another cranny, where a spider with golden spots mounts guard. But the mice having set their nests in order only look on at all this, so as not to take their part in his history before it is time.
Drafty and echoing and chill the old terminal is that same night, and for the first time the boy sitting cross-legged with his tattered toga of old sacks wrapped round him is aware of the loneliness. In a sort of vision a cozy room with sparkling hearth rises to mind, and the old woman welcoming him on the snowy doorstep; the hard lines at the corners of his mouth melt away, a dimple coming into the brown cheek, which had never known dimple before, and he curses softly with a gleam of white teeth.
"Sure, the old dame had a message to send, and I could have carried it," he muses; "because," he admits uneasily, "'t was a promise."
And hereupon by the arrangement of Destiny the mice having all in order take their cue and come out boldly into his history. In the corner along of Tim is a rubbish of old records upon which he has thrown the package brought from Molly's cottage—thrown it the first evening of his coming, with no thought of it since, being preoccupied with the business of pull-down and trample-under. But now the mice gnawing at the string open the package, and the little bottle of ink comes rolling across the floor directly before his eyes. And this appearance of the ink bottle being so timed to his mood the boy reaches for the rest of the package and laying aside the pen unfolds the sheets of paper.
One of them he examines curiously, placing it between his elbows under the lantern as he stretches flat on the floor. He knows very well 't is Molly's beginning of the message of the Farthest Lantern, and though he is not an educated person—often cursing the printing in books which makes them so hard to understand—it is certain that Tim Cannon alone of all the world can read what is written here. The eagerness of things beyond, which had been Molly Regan's, the falter of disappointment when discovering that she could not reveal them to Dan, the fierce bitterness of her rebellion—all are written plainly in the cramped scribbling and broad hideous scratches. The huge black blots were threats and prophecies of death, struck from the pen in her hand by a Providence impatient of her lingering.
The vagabond raises his eyes, his body flat and motionless. "All she wanted," he says sullenly, "was to write a page 'cause it was duty." It was another duty which had made her take him in that freezing night. He is resentful toward some thing or power—he does not know what—that Molly was prevented from writing this message.