"I believe," said Raven abruptly, one day when they were tramping the snowy road and she was answering the panic of his apprehensive mind, "you swear by Old Crow's book."
"I do," said Nan simply, "seem to be hanging on to Old Crow. I've read it over and over. And it does somehow get me. Picture writing! And human beings drawing the lines and half the time not getting them straight! But if there's something to draw, I don't care how bad the drawing is. If there's actually something there! There is, Rookie. Tira's got hold of it because she's pure in heart. It's something real, and it'll see her through."
Raven was not content with its seeing her through until he could be told what the appointed end was likely to be. If Tira was to fight this desperate battle all her mortal life, he wasn't to be placated by the rewarding certainty of a heavenly refuge at the end.
"I can never," he said, "get over the monstrous queerness of it all. Here's a woman that's got to be saved, and she's so infernally obstinate we can't save her. When I think of it at night, I swear I'm a fool not to complain of the fellow in spite of her, and then in the morning I know it can't be done. She'd block me, and I should only have got her in for something worse than she's in for now."
"Yes," said Nan, "she'd block you. Wait, Rookie. Something will happen. Something always does."
Yes, Raven thought, something always does, and sometimes, in country tragedies, so brutal a thing that the remorseful mind shudders at itself for not preventing it. But Nan, equably as she might counsel him, was herself apprehensive. She expected something. She had a sense of waiting for it. Dick must be prepared. He must be found on their side. Whatever the outcome, Raven must not suffer the distrust and censure of his own house.
Dick had been reading to her by the fire while Raven was taking Amelia for a sober walk. Nan wished Dick wouldn't read his verse to her. It made her sorry for him. What was he doing, a fellow who had seen such things, met life and death at their crimson flood, pottering about in these bizarre commonplaces of a literary jog-trot? They sounded right enough, if you stood for that kind of thing, but they betrayed him, his defective imagination, his straining mind. He didn't see the earth as it was. He was so enamored of metaphorical indirection that he tried to see everything in the terms of something else. But to-day she had her own thoughts. She sat staring into the fire, her cheeks burned by the leaping heat, and Dick, looking up at her, stopped on an uncompleted line.
"You haven't," he said, "heard a word."
"Not much of it," said Nan. She looked at him disarmingly. When her eyes were like that, Dick's heart was as water. "I was thinking about Tira."
He had to place this. Who was Tira?