"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 Dick was catching at things, Raven saw, the slightest clue to Old Crow's withdrawn personality.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, he became uncomfortably aware of the resemblance between his own proposed withdrawal and Old Crow's; but he stuck to it doggedly. It was all playing into Dick's hands and Amelia's, assuming he could predicate her mind; but he was resolved they shouldn't have it all their own way. He would give them every last straw of evidence, and it should do them no good in the end. There was a bravado about it. If Dick, in his affectionate virtue and Amelia in her energy of well-doing, wanted to challenge him to the proof, he'd give them a pretty tussle for it. "What I want to know is," said Dick, "what he thought he was going off there for? Didn't anybody know?" "They may have," said Raven. "I didn't know." "And he lived his life out there, till he died?" "Yes. And died in a very gentlemanly fashion, of pneumonia, and was found in a dignified position on his bed, hands folded, and everything in a great state of order, as if he'd known he was going and arranged things to give as little trouble as he could." "What did he do up there all by himself? Read? Write?" "He read a good deal, I believe. We found him reading when we went up."