"No," said Nan, with her uncalculated decisiveness that made you sure she was not merely speaking the truth as she saw it, but that she did see it clearly. "I have felt it, though, about other people. About two or three of the boys over there, you know. They were the ones I knew rather well. And Old Crow! up here, Rookie, alone with you, I have that sense of Old Crow's being alive, very much alive. Is it the thoughts he's left behind him, written on the air, or is it really Old Crow?"
"The air's been changed a good many times since he was here," said Raven lightly. It was not good for little girls to be wrestling forever with things formless and dark.
"Oh," said she, "but there's something left. Our minds make pictures. They don't get rubbed out. Why, I can see old Billy Jones sitting here and Old Crow bandaging his legs, and your mother and little Jack coming up to bring things in a basket. You can say that's because Old Crow told it so vividly I can't get it out of my mind. But that isn't all. Things don't get rubbed out."
XXXV
The next day Raven saw Tenney driving by, probably to the street where all the neighbors went for supplies. Up to this time Jerry had offered, whenever he was going, to do Tira's "arrants," and Tenney had even allowed him to bring home grain. Raven at once summoned Nan. It was their chance. Tira must be taken by storm. Let her leave the house as it was and run away. Nan hurried on her things, and they went up the road.
"There she is," said Nan, "at the window."
Raven, too, saw her white face for the moment before it disappeared. She was coming, he thought, making haste to let them in. He knocked and waited. No one came. He knocked again, sharply, with his stick, and then, in the after silence, held his breath to listen. It seemed to him he had never heard a house so still. That was the way his mind absurdly put it: actively, ominously still.
"She was at the window," said Nan, in a tone that sounded to him as apprehensive as the beating of his own heart. "I saw her."
He knocked again and, after another interval, the window opened above their heads and Tira leaned over the sill.