e 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 ro