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."