There it ended, and Raven sat for a long time looking at the fine painstaking script and seeing, for the moment, at least, the vision of Old Crow. He felt a great welling of love toward him, a longing to get hold of him somehow and tell him the journal had done its work. He understood. And it meant to him, in its halting simplicity, more than all the books he had ever read on the destiny of man. Meager as it was, it seemed to him something altogether new, because it had come out of the mind of an ignorant man, if a man can be called ignorant who has used his mind to its full capacity of thought and unconsciously fitted it, so far as he might, to the majestic simplicities of the Bible. Old Crow had never read anything about legend or the origins of belief. There were no such books then at Wake Hill. He read no language but his own. Whatever he had evolved, out of the roots of longing, had been done in the loneliness of the remote shepherd who charts the stars. And in the man himself Raven had found a curious companionship. Their lives seemed to have run a parallel course. Old Crow, like himself, was a victim of world sickness. And his wound had been cleansed; he had been healed.
Raven did give a little smile to the thought that, at least, the man had been saved one thing: he had no authoritative Amelia on his track to betray him to organized benevolence. And for himself something, he could not adequately tell what, was as clear to him as a road of light to unapprehended certainties. It was a symbol. It was the little language men had to talk in because they could not use the language of the stars: their picture language. But it was the rude token of ineffable reality. As the savage's drawing of a man stands for the man, so the symbols wrought out by the hungry world stand for what is somewhere, yet not visibly here. For the man exists or the savage could not have drawn him. Not all the mystics, he thought, smiling over his foolish inner conviction that could not be reached through the mind but only through the heart, not all the divines, could have set up within him the altar of faith he seemed suddenly to see before him: it had to be Old Crow. And he slept, and in the morning it did not need the mottled book at his bedside to remind him. Still it was Old Crow.
He put it all away in his mind to think over later, just as Old Crow had turned aside from his vision for the more convincing clearness of an oblique angle upon it, and dressed hastily. He got out of the house without meeting even Charlotte, and was about crossing the road on the way to the hut when he saw Tenney coming, axe and dinner pail in hand. Raven swerved on his path, and affected to be looking down the road. He could not proceed the way he was going. Tenney's mind must not be drawn toward that living focus by even the most fragmentary hint. Yet if Tira was still there, she and the child must be fed. After his glance down the road he turned back to the house, nodding at Tenney as he neared. But Tenney motioned to him.
"Here," he called stridently. "You wait."
Raven halted and as Tenney was approaching, at a quick stride, noted how queerly he was hung. It was like a skeleton walking, the dry joints acting spasmodically. When the man came up with him, he saw how ravaged his face was, and yet lighted by what a curious eagerness. Ready, he hoped, at all points for any possible attack involving Tira, Raven still waited, and the question Tenney shot at him could not have been more surprising:
"Did you find salvation?"
Raven stood looking at him for an instant, and suddenly he remembered Old Crow, who had accomplished the salvation of a sick heart and bequeathed the treasure to him.
"Yes," he said, more tolerantly than he had ever spoken to Tenney. "I think I did."
Was it his imagination that Tenney looked disappointed?
"Last night?" the man insisted. "Did you find it last night? Through me?"