aythings 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