ds--stand for the great light ahead of us, the light
I truly saw. And what the light is, still I do not know. But this I
know: God is. He lives. And He is sorry. The boy may tell me this is no
more than the words about His caring for the sparrow that falleth. But I
tell him it is more to me, for this I have found out for myself. And I
have found it out through great tribulation. But the tribulation is not
now. It has stopped. It stopped with the sound of old Billy Jones's
voice I heard--somehow I heard it--when his body lay in there dead. And
I am not afraid. I am not afraid of fear--even for the little
animals--and that is more than for myself. And that is my legacy to the
boy. He must not be afraid."

There it ended, and Raven sat for a long time looking at the fine
painstaking script and seeing, for the moment, at least, the vision of
Old Crow. He felt a great welling of love toward him, a longing to get
hold of him somehow and tell him the journal had done its work. He
understood. And it meant to him, in its halting simplicity, more than
all the books he had ever read on the destiny of man. Meager as it was,
it seemed to him something altogether new, because it had come out of
the mind of an ignorant man, if a man can be called ignorant who has
used his mind to its full capacity of thought and unconsciously fitted
it, so far as he might, to the majestic simplicities of the Bible. Old
Crow had never read anything about legend or the origins of belief.
There were no such books then at Wake Hill. He read no language but his
own. Whatever he had evolved, out of the roots of longing, had been done
in the loneliness of the remote shepherd who charts the stars. And in
the man himself Raven had found a curious companionship. Their lives
seemed to have run a parallel course. Old Crow, like himself, was a
victim of world sickness. And his wound had been cleansed; he had been
healed.

Raven did give a little smile to the thought that, at least, the man had
been saved one thing: he had no authoritative Amelia on his track to
betray him to organized benevolence. And for himself something, he could
not adequately tell what, was as clear to him as a road of light to
unapprehended certainties. It was a symbol. It was the little language
men had to talk in because they could not use the language of the stars:
their picture language. But it was the rude token of ineffable reality.
As the savage's drawing of a man stands for the man,