"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 a beginning all blotted and scratched--I brought it away, and tore it up the first night you came here. The Farthest Lantern, it was. Here is the pen she broke by stabbing into the table, she was that mad!" The Farthest Lantern! Remotely Dan Regan hears the word, with a little shock, as a challenge whispered in darkness; he shrugs his shoulders. "Come, Timothy," he urges. Now memory has seized on the word, sending it echoing through his brain; but he goes on, impatient of the start which Tim has given him, and not yet realizing how it was done.