"Our new line will be the fortunes of Barlow," he has argued, but the citizens in control laugh at him.
"The G. S. will do better by us, with new machine shops, and even build a branch into your own territory," is the answer he has taken back to his car from the final conference this very night.
As his first repulse the man of pull-down and trample-under has not known how to take it, pacing his car like a madman who mistakes his own fits for the destruction of the world. The lanterns which beckoned from a boy at Turntable blinked now in mockery; suddenly across the yards his eye, as dark as the stormy sky, steadied to a single spark—the beam of Tim Cannon's lantern through the dingy window.
"'T is in the old freight house, leased to the Barlow Suburban!" he thought aloud. "The Barlow Suburban!" And already he was into his stormcoat and on his way to parley with the ragged boy posted like a sentry on the highway of his destiny. So Regan discovered the only unguarded gateway into Barlow.
Now the scheme is brewed and Tim settles down to count the gain in money and in the interest he will make with Regan; the old building reels and shingles whir away like bats in the gale, but he only laughs dourly, the scrawny little breast hurting and straining with the ambition to be mounting on bigger storms than this. By dawn he is as drunk with scheming as ever his old grandfather with whisky, and yet his nerves do not tremble as he goes about the business of the day, kicking Charley to his feet and hitching with a scowl to the limekiln crew.
With deliberation he drives into the sheeted rain, and his look into the gulch at the bottom of the last hill, where the wreck will presently lie, is calculating and steady. In action Tim does honor to himself and to the great men who are of his company this day; the horse is plastered with clay and stoned far out into some woods, the brake thrown off for the plunge from the crest of the hill—and then as the car starts rolling and Tim grins boldly up into the black tumbling sky a dazzle of light strikes through his plotting little brain.
And in this instant the little vagabond who has arrived at Barlow and his tremendous partnership with Dan Regan by the route leading through Molly's cottage on a stormy night—in this instant with the car rumbling on its way to wreck itself and the Suburban, Tim Cannon understands that the thing will not do at all. The tremendous partnership is not, nor ever can be.
Such a revelation has come to many an ambitious man about to commit a crime or betray a trust. Cowardice or conscience may unnerve him; or on the other hand he may be fearless and willing, and yet not able to go on, realizing suddenly the thing will not do at all. It is not destined. And then remorse or dread seizes on the coward, and disappointment on the bold who would have gone on if it had been so destined.
But divil a bit does remorse seize on Tim Cannon, being a person of no moral convictions whatever; and as for dread and disappointment—one moment he steadies his darkling blue eyes on the aspect of them, and the next is racing after the car, swinging aboard, and setting the brakes, though the wheels lock and coast on down the rails, slippery with rain. For it is not the nature of him to falter or to parley with fortune—when she declares against him he takes his loss though it be that of life or limb, and quits the game.
Y'understand that perhaps his knees quake and buckle and a yelp of terror is driven out of his bony breast—beating so high with ambition but a moment before—but the spirit does not quail as he releases the brake, sets it again slowly, carefully; the wheels revolve and begin to feel the grip of the brake shoe. Still the car seems streaking to such a wreck as will mangle him with broken rods and torn sheet steel at the bottom of the gulch. Instead, by a miracle it takes the curve with only a roar and crash of glass. Tim Cannon has held the car to the rails and the Barlow Suburban to its charter.