The Best Short Stories of 1919 Part 42

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 s.h.i.+ngles 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 partners.h.i.+p 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 partners.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s. Tim Cannon has held the car to the rails and the Barlow Suburban to its charter.

The storm deepens and darkens round the lonely little car and its driver, who stands erect and still with hands on the brake considering his treason to Regan's ambitions and his own. The cause does not have to be searched for.

"Sure, I had promised Craney to manage this railroad till he got back,"

says Tim Cannon as a matter of course.

He has it in mind to hasten and explain to Regan, but lingers a moment in musing, unusual for him when business is to be done.

"'T was a wise old dame," he says; and recalls what Molly had stated as a matter of fact. "If you promise--then 't is a duty." She had said that; and: "Through storm and hards.h.i.+p and fear you would go--because you promised."

"Sure!" agrees Tim, disgusted that he has not remembered this before making the deal with Regan. "I will explain to him," says Tim, "that I promised Craney."

All of a sudden a vast respect fills him--not reverence, for he has none, but a respect for this wise woman who knew what was in a man so much better than he knew himself.

Then stepping down he plunges into the depths of storm on his way back to Barlow.

The great man laughs at his tale that the job is not done.

"You are a boy of brains, and I am not surprised at the news you bring,"

he says. "How much is the price risen, you little robber? A hundred?

Go," he says, "and finish quickly. I am not the man to haggle, be it five hundred and a job on my railroad to boot."

And as Tim shakes his head: "What now, I ask you?"

"After starting the car down to the wreck I won't let it get away from me, but catch it and set the brakes and ride it wild to the bottom."

"Why be such a fool as that?" demands Regan.

"'T is on account of promising Mr. Craney to manage the Suburban till he gets back," explains Tim.

It strikes home to Regan that this is the crisis of his life, and Tim feels his wrath as the toss of tempest. 'T would be an easy matter to kidnap the boy here an' now, and send his own agent to wreck the car, but even then the scheme is blocked. Tim must be accounted for afterward. The boy must see his pa.s.sengers and tell of the accident or there will be search made for him under the wreckage, and talk in the papers, reminding the town of the Suburban's existence, and Regan's enemies that a charter is about to be forfeited.

"Hold!" says Regan to Tim at the door. "My word I'll not touch you again," and the boy drops his hands from his neck, all but wrung by a shake of the madman pacing the car. Yet his gaze lies level and clear and there is a steadiness to the bedraggled front which baffles Regan, such a.s.surance being beyond nature in a boy.

"Whist!" he says warily, understanding somehow that nothing is to be gained here by argument or threats; "since you were fool enough to bind yourself with a promise, hold your tongue till I can find Craney."

"'T will hold," promises Tim.

Down past the terminal and out the Suburban track, bedraggled and undaunted, stalks the vagabond along the way of knowledge. Nor does he look up till coming on faithful old Charley, who has found his way back to the car and stands waiting to be hitched. Tim halts, surveying him knowingly.

"Faith, Charley, she was a wise one," he says.

From that hour he takes up the plod of duty, keening in that little minor whistle which all car drivers pick up from the wind and drumming of hoofbeats on frozen ground. And he is always on time in every weather, so that presently the lime burners relent and joke him, and Katy in pity for the outcast would pat his cheek friendlily--but never an encouragement do they receive from Tim standing at his brake and speaking sternly to Charley, meager and windbitten but unconquerable by humor or kindness as he has been by threat and danger.

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 hards.h.i.+ps 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."

Once she thanks Tim for attending his trust so faithfully, but he does not reply. It is not worth while; she could not understand--that he does this thing because it is promised and inevitable, not because he relishes it.

As Craney's orders are to arrange the Sunday schedule to Katy's convenience he sits erect on a stone, watching from a distance till she starts toward the car. The things within him burn and torment, and keep him company; he will not let them go or even quiet them by promises of what he will achieve when this duty is done and off his hands. Instead he holds them at bay, coldly.

Till one Sunday afternoon a message mutters out of the northern sky; from Regan it comes, shaking the very ground which the vagabond, as if understanding it, grips in his nervous fingers. "'T is like the guns in battle," he says, and that night strolling among the men up the yard learns that the roar is that of dynamite where the construction gangs of Regan's new line are breaching the distant hills for entrance into Great Southwest territory.

Regan is coming on, undaunted by the refusal of Barlow to let him through; day by day the iron rumor swells in the northern sky, and Tim sleeping or waking presses close after the vision of a giant of bronze with half-lidded smoldering eyes who juggles men and steel in the burning dusk beyond the construction camps.

Defiant of the winter winds, even to refusing the jacket which Katy buys for him, he s.h.i.+vers with the chill of exhaustion, for now he must struggle the more fiercely with ambition, night and day. Yet on he plods, keening in that strange little whistle. All this bleak stretch of his history he crosses, in a sort of delirium loading the battered old car with company of the make-believe kind whom he has watched the children in the city parks playing with long ago. The ghost of a jack-in-the-box which he had once dragged away from a playground and murdered with a stick in his den appears by night in the terminal building. It smiles forgivingly and he frowns back.

When the snow falls he marches ahead of Charley, a shovel on his shoulder, storming the drifts. A rope round his body keeps the whipping rags together, and he wears an old sack for a waistcoat. The limekiln closes down and there is no pa.s.senger left but Katy, so Tim breaks into the treasure holes in the wall to buy oats and bread. Once again the Barlow Suburban is devouring its master. And now the rumble of dynamite sinks lower and lower like the death rattle of Regan's destiny and one afternoon dies away entirely.

That night Tim sits cross-legged on his pallet by his rusty little stove, awe-stricken, as if somehow a battle waited on him. And out of that dread stillness under the northern sky Regan comes to him, streaked red with the clay of the camps.

"Craney is lost or dead," he says. "I have searched high and low; now it is up to you."

The boy listening intently agrees with Regan. "'T is too bad I promised Craney and have the duty."