ound she was no good, went up into the woods and built the
old hut I got into shape in the spring of 1914. Queer! I expected to go
up there to study and write. I'd got to the point, I s'pose, where I
thought if I had a different place to write in I could write better.
Sure sign of waning powers! Well, he lived there by himself, and folks
thought he was queer and began to call him Old Crow. I saw him several
times when I was a little chap, never alone. Father took me with him
when he went up to the hut to carry food. Mother never approved of my
going. She disapproved of it so much that father stopped taking me."

"Well, you saw him," said Dick, in a way of holding him to his
narrative, so that Raven, wondering why it was of such importance, bent
a frowning look on him.

"Yes, I saw him. And he was nice to me, uncommon nice. He put his hand
on my shoulder and looked down at me in a way--well, not the
patronizing, grown-up way, but as if, now I come to think of it, as if
he pitied me."

"How did he look?"

Dick was catching at things, Raven saw, the slightest clue to Old Crow's
withdrawn personality. He seemed, on his side, to be constructing a
portrait. Raven sought about in the closed chambers of his mind and
produced one significant bit of remembrance after another. They were
retrieved with difficulty out of the disorder of things regarded as of
no importance: but here they were.

"He was tall, thin, rather hatchet-faced, something as I am. Oh, you
knew that, didn't you? No beard, and I think he was the neatest person I
ever saw. Father was clean shaven, you remember; but there were days
when he either got lazy or was too busy to shave. I remember how
exquisitely nice and peeled his face used to look on Sunday. But Old
Crow was shaved all the time, judging from the way he looked the few
times I saw him. I've heard father and mother speak of it, too.
Charlotte told me once she'd seen him and he was neat as a new pin."

"How old was he when he went up there into the woods?"

"To live alone? I don't know. Forty, maybe. Comparatively young,
anyway."

"Was it the woman? Was there a cause for it, a cause people knew?"

"There wasn't any cause I knew. He simply, so far as I ever heard,
passed the place over to father--that was his nephew, you know--and went
up the hill and built himself a log hut. It was well built. I only had
to calk it some more and put in another flooring when I came into it."

As Raven went on,