Old Crow

								

and prudence to refuse. He wondered now how he had been spared, saved
really by the prophetic gods from taking that guarantee, though he was
then so sure of his ability to justify the risk and pay it all back.
Perhaps his mother had helped him. She was a woman of rare sanity, and
though he could not remember her uttering a dissuading word, he was
sure, in the light of his own middle-aged vision, that she must have
been throwing the weight of her clear-mindedness into the scale.
Then there was the question of a college course and of European travel:
those were among the colossal gifts Anne Hamilton had sought to lavish
on him. But again he had saved himself, accepting one thing only, a
benefit that must have hurt her heart like a stone, she was so bent on
his beautiful, bright aptitude at writing taking its place as soon as
possible, and with no dimming from a prosaic drudgery, in the world as
she knew it: the Boston world, the New England world, the court of
judgment that sits across the Atlantic. This benefit he asked for and
received, from her father: a clerk's place in the mills--Hamilton was a
wool magnate--and a chance to earn steady money for himself and his
mother, who was every year, in spite of her stout heart, slipping into
the weakness of the chronic invalid. Raven wrote his books at the fag
end of days given to his dull industry, and he succeeded in calling
attention to himself as a classical scholar, and then, as he impatiently
hit out with what he called pot-boilers in dialect, he got a popular
hearing and more money as well. All the time he was advancing in the
mills, and, as he advanced, he never failed to see before him the
flutter of Anne's discreet draperies or hear the click of her determined
heel. She never appeared in the business at all, but he was perfectly
sure there wasn't a preferment offered him by her father for which he
wasn't indebted to her manipulation of Hamilton in long, skillful hours
beforehand. Hamilton had no slightest idea he was being influenced, but,
as the years went on, he grew in appreciation of young Raven's business
abilities to such a degree that John, reading his mind like a familiar
tongue, wondered whether after all it was true, and he hadn't a genius
for the affairs of wool. Was he doing the thing that seemed so dull to
him with such mechanical and yet consummate cleverness that he was worth
all this unripe advancement, or was it indeed Anne's white hand that was
turning the wheel of power, her wand that was keeping the augmented
vision of him ever before her father's credulous eyes? But he could not
retard the wheels of his progress without making a fool of himself, and
by the time his sister had prosperously married and his mother had died,
he was a partner in the business, and then Hamilton also died and Raven
was asking Dick, hoping all the time he would refuse, if he wanted to
come in. Dick did refuse, with an instant hearty decision for which his