"No," said Raven quietly, "we won't light fires and smoke pipes. We'll go down now, to bed. d.i.c.k, you're a fool. I've had to tell you so more than once. But you're a dear fool, and sometime I may be able to remember that and nothing else. Just now I can't seem to want to do anything but pitch you, neck and crop, into the snow."

They went down together, d.i.c.k still doggedly conscious of doing the only thing possible, and when they were near the foot of the hill, Raven yelled at him, the old Moosewood whoop, and sprang. It was the signal between them when one or the other had a mind to "wrastle," and they stood there in the road and a.s.sailed each other scientifically and with vigor, to the great benefit of each. It was a beneficent outburst, and Charlotte, roused by the cry, ran to a chamber window and stood there in her nightgown, watching.

"How they do carry on!" she commented to Jerry, when they had separated and come in, chaffing volubly. "For all the world like two toms."

Things were easier between them, now they had mauled each other, and they ran upstairs together, "best friends" as they used to be when d.i.c.k learned the game. He was wonderfully encouraged. This was the Uncle Jack he used to tag about the place. He went to bed with a hopeful presentiment that, if things kept on like this, he might take Raven back to town presently, reasonable enough to place himself voluntarily in the right hands.

To Tira, the week dragged on with a malicious implication of never meaning to end until it ended her. Strange things could be done in a week, it reminded her, conclusive, sinister things. The old fears were on in full force, and though it had not looked as if they could be much augmented, now they piled up mountain high. And she presently found out they were not the old fears at all. There was a fresh menace, ingeniously new. She had studied the weather of Tenney's mind and knew the signs of it. She could even antic.i.p.ate them. But this new menace she could never have foreseen. It was simply his crutch. An evil magic seemed to have fallen upon it, and it was no longer a crutch but a weapon. Tenney would not abandon it. His foot was improving fast, and the doctor had suggested his dropping the crutch for a cane; but he kept on with it, kept on obstinately without a spoken pretext. To Tira, there was something sinister in that. She saw him not relying on it to any extent, but sedulously keeping it by him. Sometimes he gesticulated with it. He had, with great difficulty, brought in the cradle again, as if to emphasize his callousness to the gash in it, and once he tapped it with the crutch, while the baby lay there asleep, and set it rocking. Tira, cooking at the table, felt her heart stand still. An actual weapon she could flee from, but was this a weapon? The uncertainty was in itself terrifying.

It was the day he set the cradle rocking that she awoke in the night, her fear full upon her. He was at her side, sleeping heavily. The baby was on her other arm. Yet it seemed to her that the menace from Tenney had pierced her to reach the child and, on its pa.s.sage, stabbed through her racing heart. Then her temptation came upon her, so simple a thing she seemed stupid never to have thought of it before. She rose to a sitting posture, put her feet out of bed, took the child, and carried him with her into the sitting-room. She laid him on the couch and covered him, and then stole back into the bedroom. The crutch was there, in its habitual place at night, leaning against the foot of the bed. She could put her hand on it in the dark. Tenney, too, she had begun to reflect, could put his hand on it. What deeds might he not do with it in those hours when the sanities of life also sleep? She took it gently and went out again through the sitting-room and kitchen into the shed. Her purpose had been to hide it behind the wood. But if he came on it there, it would not be a crutch he found. It would be a weapon. She put her hand on an upright beam, as she stood painfully thinking it out, and touched the handle of a saw, hanging there on a nail; immediately she knew. She went back into the kitchen, lighted the lantern and carried it into the shed. There stood the crutch leaning against the beam below the saw, a weapon beyond doubt. She set down her lantern, laid the crutch on the block Tenney used to split kindlings, set her foot upon it and methodically sawed it into stove wood lengths. When it was done she gathered up the pieces, carried them into the sitting-room, to the stove where Tenney always, in winter weather, left a log to smoulder, dropped them in and opened the draught. Then she went back to the shed, swept up her scattering of sawdust, hung the saw in its place, gave a glance about her to see that everything was in its usual order, and returned into the kitchen. She put out the lantern, hung it on its nail, went into the sitting-room and partially shut the draft on the noisy blaze.

She did not dare quite shut it, lest a bit of the weapon should be left to cry out from the ashes and tell. When she was back in bed again, the child on her arm, Tenney, disturbed by her coming, woke and turned. He lifted his head from the pillow, to listen, and she wondered if he could hear the beating of her heart.

"You there?" he asked. "What's that stove started out roarin' for? The chimbly ain't afire?"

"No," said Tira. "Mebbe somethin's ketched." She got out of bed, ran into the sitting-room, noiselessly shut the crack of draught, and came back. "Them knots are kinder gummy," she said calmly, and was heartened by the evenness of her voice. "I guess 'twon't roar long."

They listened together until the sound diminished, and Tira knew when he relaxed and dropped off again. It did not seem to her that she dropped off at all, she was so relieved to think of her enemy smouldering and done for.

This was the night Raven had had his premonition of her and gone up to the hut to find her, and the next night he was aware of her again, as if she had put a hand out through the darkness and given him an imploring touch. He and d.i.c.k had had an almost jovial day. Their wrestling bout had proved sound medicine. It had, Raven thought, cleared the air of the fool things they had been thinking about each other. This evening they had talked, straight talk, as between men, chiefly of d.i.c.k's future and his fitness for literature. There was no hint of Nan, though each believed she was the pivot on which d.i.c.k's fortunes turned. About ten they went up to bed, and again Raven found himself too uneasy to sleep, and again he sat down by the window in the dark. Incredibly, yet as he found he knew it would happen, he saw a figure running up the path. It came almost to the front door, halted a moment, as if in doubt, stooped and threw up a clutch of snow against a window. The snow was full of icy pellets; they rattled against the pane. But it was not his window, which was dark; the hand had cast its signaling pellets to the room where a light was burning and where the outline of a man's figure had just been visible. And the man was d.i.c.k. But Raven knew. He opened his door and shut it as softly, stole down the stairs, opened the outer door, and drew her in. Then, in the instant of snapping on the light, he saw Tira recoil; for there, at the foot of the stairs, was d.i.c.k. She would have slipped out again, but Raven's hand was on her. He still held hers, as he had taken it, and now he turned her to the library door. It was all done quickly, and meantime he said to d.i.c.k, "Go back to bed," and d.i.c.k perhaps not responding exactly, commented under his breath, "Good G.o.d!"

Raven followed Tira into the library, turned the key in the lock, switched on the light in his reading lamp, and drew a chair to the smouldering fire.

"Sit down," he said. "You must get warm."

He threw on cones and roused a leaping blaze. Then he made himself look at her. He forgot d.i.c.k and d.i.c.k's shocked bewilderment. He was calm as men are calm in an accomplished certainty. She had come. She did not seem cold or in any sense excited, though she put her hands to the blaze and bent toward it absently, as if in courtesy because he had given it to her. As she sat, drawing long breaths that meant the ebbing of emotion, he let his eyes feed on her face. She was paler than he had seen her. There were shadows under her eyes, and the lashes on her cheek looked incredibly long: a curved inky splash. Her hood had fallen back, but she kept the blue cloak about her to her chin, as if it made a seclusion, a protection even against him. But it was only an instant before she withdrew her hands from the blaze and turned to him, with a little smile. She began to speak at once, as if she had scant time, either for indulging her own weakness or troubling him.

"You'll think it's queer," she said. "I've come here routin' you out o'

bed when you've give me that nice place up there to run away to."

Raven found himself ready to break out into a.s.severations that it was the only natural thing for her to do. Where should she go, if not to him?

"No," he said, the more gravely because he was counseling himself while he answered her. "You did right. But," he added, "where's----?"

She understood. Where was the baby who always made the reason for her flight?

"He's up there," she answered, with a motion of her hand toward the road.

"In the hut?" he exclaimed. "You left him there?"

It seemed impossible.

"Yes," she said quietly, "all soul alone. I run out with him, same as I always have. I run up there. I found the road all broke out. I wa'n't surprised. I knew you'd do it. That is, I'd ha' known it if I'd thought anything about it. An' I found the key an' started the fire. An' then I knew I'd got to see you this night, an' I put him on the lounge an' set chairs so's he wouldn't fall out, an' packed him round with pillers, an'

locked him in an' left him."

She paused and Raven nodded at her as if he wanted to find it as simple as it seemed to her.

"You see, I couldn't bring him down here," she said. "He might cry. An'

there's Charlotte. An' Jerry. An' the young man. I'm sorry the young man see me. That's too bad."

"It's all right," said Raven briefly, though he was aware it was, from d.i.c.k's present point of view, all wrong. "I'll attend to that."

"He's safe enough," said Tira, her eyes darkening as she recurred to the baby. "If he cries, 'twon't do no hurt up there. Well!" She seemed to remind herself that there was much to say. "I must be gittin' along with my story." She looked at him in a most moving wistfulness, and added: "I got scared."

x.x.xII

Raven gave his answering nod. That seemed to be about all he could respond with, in his danger of saying the rash thing.

"Yes," he said, "scared. Same way?"

"No," she said. "Worse. I guess I never've been so scared. An' I've got myself to thank. You see, last night----"

"Yes," said Raven. "I got wind of it last night."

This, though it puzzled her, she could not stay to follow out, with the baby up in the hut defended only by pillows and Tenney perhaps turning to ask: "You there?"

"You see," she said, "it's his crutch."

"You mean," supplied Raven, brute anger rising up in him against brute man, "he's struck you with it?"

"No, no," she hastened to a.s.sure him. "He ain't even threatened me. Only somehow it was like his havin' somethin' always by him, somethin' he could strike with, an'--I dunno what come over me--I burnt it up."

At once Raven faced the picture of it, the mad impulse, the resulting danger. But he would not add his apprehensiveness to hers.

"I dunno," she said, "as you'll hardly see what I mean: but it begun to look kinder queer to me, that crutch did. All I could think of was how much better 'twould be for everybody concerned if 'twas burnt up."

"Yes," said Raven. "I see. We all feel so sometimes, when we're tired out." The moderation of these words but ill expressed his tumultuous mind. That was it, his pa.s.sionate understanding told him. The natural world throws its distorted shadows, and our eyes have to be at their strongest not to recoil in panic, while we turn back to strike. "And,"

he said, because she seemed to be mired here in the bog of her own wonderment, "in the morning of course he found it out."

The strangest look came into her face: she was horrified, and more than that, indubitably more, she was perplexed.

"Yes," she said, "he found it out. 'Course he found it out first thing, 'fore he dressed him even. I got up early an' made the fires. I've been makin' 'em sence he's laid up. So I don't know no more'n the dead how he looked when it first come over him the crutch wa'n't there. But he come out int' the kitchen--I'd been t' the barn then an' give the cows some fodder--an' he carried a cane, his gran'ther's it was, same's the crutch. It's got a crook handle, an' I've kep' it in the chimney corner to pull down boxes an' things from the upper cupboard. An' he went out to the barn an' come in an' eat his breakfast, an' eat his dinner an'

his supper, when they come round, an' we done the barn work together, an' he ain't mentioned the crutch from first to last."

"Well," said Raven, in a futile rea.s.surance, "perhaps he thinks he's left it somewhere, and if he doesn't particularly need it--Jerry told me only this morning the doctor said he might as well be getting used to a cane."

"No," said Tira conclusively, "he don't think he's left it anywheres.

He's keepin' still, that's all."

Immediately Raven saw the menacing significance of Tenney's keeping still. His mind ran with a quick foot over the imprisonment of the two there together. Was there a moment, he wondered, when the suffering brute was not threatening to her, when her heart could rest itself for the next hurried flight? He ventured his question.

"Has he been"--he hesitated for a word and found what sounded to him a mawkish one--"good to you at all, these last weeks?"

Tira reflected a moment and then, for the first time since she came in from the cold, the blood rushed to her haggard cheeks. She remembered a moment, the day before the burning of the crutch, when he had found her doing her hair before the bedroom gla.s.s and had caught her to him wildly. She had put him away from her, though gently, because his violence, whether it took the form of starved pa.s.sion or raging hate, always seemed to her the unbecoming riot of a forward child, and he had left her in a shamefaced anger, a grumbling attempt to recover his lost dignity. Tira hid even from herself the miserable secrets of marital savagery. No sacrifice was too great to hide from Tenney her knowledge of his abas.e.m.e.nt. Most of all must she hide it from another man, and that man Raven. Her answer was not ready, but she had it for him, and he understood, in his unfailing knowledge of her, that it was the first crooked one she had ever given him, and for the first time he felt anger toward her. She was defending her enemy, and against him.

"He does the best he can," she said. "He takes things terrible hard. I dunno's I ever see anybody that took 'em so hard."