Part 1, Chapter 4, Section 6

Dagny rushes to the Phoenix-Durango’s city office, prompting a gentle and lifeless Dan Conway to state, “Funny, I thought you would come” (p 77 s 146). Dagny tries to save the Phoenix-Durango: “Dan, you have to fight them. I’ll help you. … That Alliance agreement that you signed? It won’t hold. … No court will uphold it. And if Jim tries to hide behind the usual looters’ slogan of ‘public welfare’ I’ll go on the stand and swear that Taggart Transcontinental can’t handle the whole traffic of Colorado.”

Dan states “they had the right to do it” because he had “promised to obey the majority” and thus does not want to fight the decision (p 77 s 146). He feels “helpless astonishment” when the majority passes the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule (p 78 s 146). Dan elaborates:

Dan sees “no way out” because despite the Rule being “so damn unjust” to him, it would be “wrong” and “selfish” to fight it (p 78-79 s 146). Apparently his version of the common good was originally optimistic, “They said all of us were to stand for the common good. I thought what I had done down there in Colorado was good. Good for everybody” (p 78 s 146). Now his views have been reduced, “I don’t know what’s right any more. … I don’t think I care” (p 79 s 146). Dagny realizes “suddenly” that “all further words were useleless and that Dan Conway would never be a man of action again.”

With his future “as it was twenty years ago” with only line a line in Arizona now left to run, Dan seems to lack a discrete focus (p 79 s 146). “Guess I’ll take it easy now. Guess I’ll go fishing.” Dagny wonders what defeated Dan Conway because a “man of this kind” could not have been broken by James Taggart. She wants Dan to know her feelings are not “out of pity or charity or any ugly reason like that” but because she intended to “give you the battle of your life” and “drive you out, if necessary” (p 80 s 146). Dagny then cries out “Oh God, Dan, I don’t want to be a looter!” and she does not event want to look at the Rio Norte Line anymore.

Dan tells Dagny to get the Rio Norte Line ready before the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule takes effect in nine months (p 80 s 146). “If you don’t, that will be the end of Ellis Wyatt and all the rest of them down there, and they’re the best people left in the country. … Whatever you do, you won’t be a looter. No looter could run a railroad in that part of the country and last at it. Whatever yo make down there, you will have earned it. Lice like your brother don’t count, anyway.” Dan smile with sadness and pity. “You’d better not feel sorry for me … of the two of us, it’s you who have [sic] the harder time ahead. And I think you’re going to get it worse than I did.”