"You used to go up there and see him," said Dick, willingly relinquishing Miss Anne. There were times when, as he remembered from boyhood, old Jack was dangerous. "Some of the things about him shocked you. Some appealed to you. Pity, too: you must have pitied him tremendously. You probably knew about his craze over this girl he mentions here. You may have heard things about her, just as he did. Jack, I can see—the whole thing has come to me in the last ten minutes—Old Crow has been the big influence in your life. Everything else has come from that. And then the war knocked you out and you got cafard and the whole blasted business blew up and came to the surface and—there you are."
"Yes," said Raven, "here we are."
He leaned back in his chair and laughed until he could have cried. Never had he found anything funnier than the boy's honest face and his honest voice pouring forth undigested scraps from haphazard gleanings.
"Dick," he said, "you're a dear fellow. But you're an awful ass. The trouble is with you, old man, you've no imagination. It was left out. You're too much like your mother and it'll be the death of you as it is of her if you don't stop being intelligent. That sort of popular science stuff, you know. Be a little sloppy, boy. Come off your high horse."
Dick was still unassailably good-natured. Raven was his job, and he could hold himself down with a steady hand.
"Now," said Raven, "for heaven's sake scrap your complexes, even if you scrap Old Crow with 'em, and let's see if we can't be moderately peaceable. That is, if we've got to be marooned here together."
And by dint of giving his mind to it, he was himself peaceable and even amusing, but as the dark came on he found he had much ado to keep up the game; he was too sensitively awake to Tira. With no new reason for it, he was plainly worried, and, leaving Dick reading by the fire, went up to his own room. He sat down by a front window, facing the dark wall of the hill, but when, after another hour, he heard Dick come up and shut himself in, he slipped down the stairs, took his cap and went off to the hut. The sky was dark, but clear, and the stars burned in galaxies of wonder. But the beauty of the night only excited and oppressed him until he could assure himself she was not out in it on one of her dreadful flights. If he found her in the hut, he could go home to bed. He reached the door, stopped, and put his hand under the stone. The key was there, and he laughed out in his thankfulness. The laugh was at his fears, and he wondered whether he would rather think of her there in her prison or here, still under sentence, due at her prison again. Then he heard a step: a man's crashing on regardless of underbrush. Was it Tenney? Should he hear that voice as he had before in its wild "Hullo"?
"Where are you?" came the voice. "Where are you, old man?"
Dick had followed him and was, in his affectionate solicitude, warning him against surprise. Raven ran down to meet him, and by the turn of the fir trees they faced each other.
"Dick," said Raven, "what are you up here for?"