Raven advanced into the room and chose a seat by the window. Amelia, still thinly clad above and ineffectually baking herself, made him irrationally want to get away from fires.
"Old Crow?" he asked.
"Why, yes, if you want to call him that. I suppose that's what the country people did call him."
"Why," said Raven slowly, getting his recollections in order, prepared to give her what was good for her and no more, "I suppose there's no doubt he was an eccentric. He built the hut up there and moved into it and finally went over the countryside doctoring, in an unscientific way—and praying—and finally hauled in Billy Jones, a sort of old rake they thought of sending to the poor farm, and took care of him till he died. Billy was a tank. When we were little, there used to be stories we got hold of about the way Billy's legs swelled. One of the boys 'down along' told me he'd been up there and looked into the hut and Billy sat there in a chair with his legs bandaged and the water dripping through to the floor. We all wished our legs would drip. We thought it was great. Mother wouldn't let me go up there after old Billy went into residence. But we boys kept on hearing about him. I've no doubt we got most of the salient points."
He was giving her more than was good for her, after all. Amelia wouldn't like this. She didn't like it.
"Shocking!" she commented, shaking her head in repudiation.
"I've thought since," said Raven, partly in musing recollection and perhaps a little to show her what she got by fishing for old memories, "Billy had cirrhosis of the liver. As I said, Billy was a tank."
"We needn't go into the question of Jones," said Amelia, with dignity. "He doesn't concern us. It was a perfectly unjustifiable thing for Uncle John to do, this taking him into his own house and nursing him. Perfectly. But it only shows how unbalanced Uncle John really was."
"Call him Old Crow, Milly," Raven interrupted her, resolved she should accept the picture as it was if she were bent on any picture at all. "Everybody knew him by that: just Old Crow. At first, I suppose it was the country way of trying to be funny over his name, as soon as he got funny to them with his queerness. And then, after he'd gone round nursing the sick and praying with the afflicted, they may have put real affection into it. You can't tell. You see, Milly, Old Crow was a practical Christian. From all I've heard, he was about the only one you and I've ever met."
"He was certainly not normal," said Amelia ingenuously, and while Raven sat rolling that over in his delighted mind and getting the full logic of it, she continued: "Do you know, John, he was a very commanding man, very handsome really? You look like him."