"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 assurance 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.