Old Crow Part 59

He went off and Charlotte thought he was right, the afternoon waning as it was. She would tell Nan later, a good deal later, when Raven and d.i.c.k had had time to come down again. And this was how d.i.c.k climbed the slope and was approaching the door of the hut when Tenney stole behind him through the dusk and fired.

Raven, in the instant of seeing d.i.c.k there on the ground, locked the door of the hut, dropped the key in his pocket, knelt by him and, with a hand on his pulse, snapped out his orders to Tenney, standing there staring vacuously:

"Go down to the house. Get Jerry and the sled. Come back with him. Get a move on. Run!"

Tenney continued looking emptily at him, still babbling about pa'tridges, and Raven got up and wrenched the gun from his hand, calling loudly, though they were close together:

"Don't you hear me? Get Jerry and the sled. Run, man, run."

Tenney started away in a dazed indecisiveness and Raven remembered his hurt and that he probably could not run. At the same instant Tenney's mind cleared. He was plunging down the slope and, whatever anguish it caused him, insensible to it.

Raven unlocked the door, stepped in and found Tira facing him.

"Go home," he said. "Get the boy and go down to my house. You're to stay there now."

At the instant of saying this, he set the gun inside the door, s.n.a.t.c.hed some blankets from the bedroom and came out again. Tira stepped aside to let him pa.s.s. It looked as if he would have walked over her. He covered d.i.c.k warmly, picked up the boy's gla.s.ses from the snow and dropped them into his pocket. With that involuntary act, the emotional a.s.sault of the whole thing nearly had him. He remembered d.i.c.k's eyes as he had sometimes seen them without their gla.s.ses, wistful and vaguely soft.

Always his eyes, denuded of the lenses behind which they lived, had a child's look of helpless innocence, and here he was floored by life's regardless cruelty. Though, if he was not only floored but actually done for, he was not yet the one to suffer. He was away in that sanctuary of the a.s.saulted body known as unconsciousness, and Raven did not dwell for more than an instant on "the pity of it" all.

Tira had come out of the hut and, at sight of d.i.c.k under his mound of covering, she gave a little cry and stooped to him with outstretched hand, perhaps with an idea of somehow easing him. But Raven caught her wrist before she touched him.

"Don't," said he. "I've sent down for the sled."

"Is he----?" she whispered, stepping back as he released her.

"I don't know," said he. "You can't do anything. Don't stay here."

But she stood still, staring down at the mound of blankets and Raven again on his knees beside it, his fingers on d.i.c.k's wrist.

"Didn't you hear me?" said he curtly. "You're to get the child and come to my house for the night."

"Will he"--and now he saw her mind was with Tenney--"will he be arrested?"

"I hope," Raven allowed himself the bitterness of saying, "I hope he'll get imprisonment for life."

And there was such sternness in the kind voice that Tira turned and went, half running, up the path to the back road and home.

That night at eleven, when the house had quieted, and Raven was alone in the library, he permitted himself a glimpse at the denied emotional aspect of the day. Jerry had got quickly to the top of the hill and d.i.c.k had been moved down without disaster, Tenney, white-faced and bewildered, lending his strength as he was told. Raven called upon him for this and that, and kept him by them on the way down to the house, so that Tira might have time to s.n.a.t.c.h the child and hurry away. At the moment of nearing the house he remembered her, and that if Tenney went directly back by the high road, he might meet her.

"Here!" This to Tenney, who was sagging on behind the sled, and who at once hurried along to his side. "Go back to the hut and see if I've left the key in the door. If it's there, you can lock up and bring it down to me. If it isn't, don't come back."

Then, he a.s.sumed, Tenney would go home by the back road, the shortest route. For he would not find the key, which was still in Raven's pocket.

Tenney looked at him, seemed to have something to say, and finally managed it. As Raven remembered, it was something about pa'tridges and his gun. Whether he was shaken by fright, one could not have told, but he was, as Charlotte remarked upon it afterward, "all to pieces." Raven ignored the mumble, whatever it was, and Tenney, finally understanding that he might as well be as far off the earth as d.i.c.k, for all the attention anybody was going to pay him, turned, limping, and then Raven, with that mechanical sensitiveness to physical need always awake in him now, caught up a stick lying in the dooryard and tossed it to him.

"Here!" said he. "That'll do for a cane."

Tenney could not catch; he was too stupid from bewilderment of mind. But he picked it up, and went limping off across the road and up the hill.

Then the women had to be told, and when Jerry brought the horses to a standstill at the door, Raven ran in, pushing Charlotte aside--dear Charlotte! she was too used to life and death to need palliatives of indirection in breaking even such news as this--and believed now, as he thought it over, that he met Milly and Nan, who had seen their approach, running to meet him, and that he said something about accident and, as if it were an echo of Tenney, a fool shooting partridges. Milly, shocked out of her neat composure, gave a cry, but Nan turned on her, bade her be quiet, and called Charlotte to the bedroom to get it ready. It was Milly's room, but the most accessible place. Raven telephoned for the doctor at the street and called a long-distance for a Boston surgeon of repute, asking him to bring two nurses; and he and Nan rapidly dressed the wound, with d.i.c.k still mercifully off in the refuge called unconsciousness. Raven remembered that Milly, as she got in his way, kept telling him she ought to have taken a course in first aid, and that d.i.c.k was her son and if a mother didn't know, who did? But he fancied he did not answer at all, and that he and Nan worked together, with quick interrogative looks at each other here and there, a lifted eyebrow, a confirming nod. And now the local doctor had arrived, had professed himself glad his distinguished colleague had been summoned and approved Raven's work. He was gone in answer to another urgent call, and the surgeon had not come, could not come for hours. But d.i.c.k was conscious, though either too weak or too wisely cautious to lift an eyelid, and Nan was with him. That Raven had ordered, and told Milly she was to come to the library after Jerry moved her things upstairs and she was settled for the night.

Milly was badly shaken. She looked, her strained eyes and mouth compressed, as if not only was she robbed of the desire of sleep, but had sworn never, in her distrust of what life could do to her, to sleep again. But she had not appeared, and as Raven sat there waiting for her, Charlotte came down the stairs and glanced in, a comprehensive look at the light, the fire, and at him, as if to a.s.sure him, whatever the need in the sick room, she kept him also in mind. Raven signed to her and she nodded. He had a question to ask. It had alternated in his mind with queer little heart-beats of alarm about d.i.c.k: hemorrhage, shock, hemorrhage--recurrent beats of prophetic disaster.

"Have you seen Tira?" he asked. "I told her to come here and stay till we could get her off somewhere."

Then he remembered that, so wide-reaching did Charlotte always seem to him in her knowledge of the life about her, he had not explained why Tira must be got out of the way, and that also was before him. But in her amazing habit of knowing, she knew.

"No," she said, "she ain't b'en near. She won't leave Tenney. She's one o' them that sticks by."

Immediately he was curious to hear what she had imagined, how she knew.

Was the neighborhood awake to even the most obscure local drama? While Tira thought she was, at the expense of her own safety, covering Tenney's wildness of jealousy, were they all walking in the sun?

"Who told you?" he asked her.

"Why, n.o.body," said Charlotte. "It didn't take no tellin'. Jerry heard him hollerin' after her that day you was up in the woods, an' when you kep' the loggin' road broke, I knew you was givin' her some kind of a hole to creep into."

So they had known, she and Jerry. But they had not told. They would never tell.

"One thing," said Charlotte, smoothing her ap.r.o.n and looking at him in an anxious interrogation, "what be we goin' to say? That was the first thing doctor asked: 'Who done it?' (You know I let him in.) ''Twas a poor crazed creatur,' says I, 'after pa'tridges.' I was goin' to say d.i.c.k had a gun an' tripped up over a root; but that never'd do in the world, shot in the back so."

"The partridges'll do for the present," said Raven grimly. "He's certainly crazy enough. He said he was shooting partridges. We'll take it at that."

Charlotte went on, and he sat thinking. So Tira had chosen not to come.

So fixed was his mind on the stern exigency of the situation, as it now stood, that her disobedience in itself irritated him. The right of decision, as he reasoned, had pa.s.sed out of her hands into his. He was, in a sense, holding the converging lines of all this sudden confusion; he was her commanding officer. At that moment, when he was recognizing his anger against her and far from palliating, cherishing it as one of the tools in his hand, to keep him safely away from enfeebling doubt, Milly came noiselessly down the stairs. She would, he realized, in her unflinching determination to do the efficient thing, be as silent as a shadow. She appeared in the doorway, and her face, her bearing, were no longer Milly's. This was a paper semblance of a woman, drawn on her lines, but made to express grief and terror. Quiet as she was, the shock had thrown her out of her studied calm. She was elemental woman, despising the rigidities of training, scourged into revolt. Even her dress, though fitted to the technical needs of the hour, was unstudied.

Her hair, ordinarily waved, even in the country, by the intelligence of her capable fingers, was twisted in a knot on the back of her head.

Raven, so effective had been the success of her ameliorating devices, thought Milly's hair conspicuously pretty. But now there was a little b.u.t.ton of it only, as if she had prepared for exacting service where one displaced lock might undo her. A blue silk negligee was wrapped about her, with a furled effect of tightening to the blast, and her face was set in a mask of grief that was not grief alone, but terror. She came in and sat down in one of the chairs by the hearth, not relaxing in the act, but as if she could no longer stand.

"John!" she said, in a broken interrogation. "John!"

He got up and elaborately tended the fire, laying the sticks together with an extreme care, and thinking, as he did it, by one of those idle divagations of the mind, like a grace note on the full chord of action, that a failing fire had helped a man out of more than one hole in this disturbing life. It gave your strung nerves and rasped endurance a minute's salutary pause. He put down the tongs and returned to his chair.

"Buck up, Milly," said he. "Everything's being done. Now it'll be up to d.i.c.k."

But he realized, as if it were another trial setting upon him at the moment when he had borne enough, that his eyes were suddenly hot. This was not for Milly, not for himself. Again, for some obscure reason, he saw d.i.c.k's eyes, softened, childlike, as he had recalled them without their gla.s.ses. Through these past weeks of strain, he had been irritated with the boy, he had jeered at him for the extravagances of his gusty youth. Why, the boy was only a boy, after all! But Milly, leaning forward to the fire, her trembling hands over the blaze, was talking with amazing intensity, but still quietly, not to disturb the stillness of the expectant house. For the house, suddenly changed, seemed itself to be waiting, as houses do in time of trouble. Was it for d.i.c.k to die or to take on life again? Houses are seldom kind at such times, even in their outward tranquillity. They are sinister.

And when Milly began to speak, Raven found he had to deal with a woman surprisingly different from the one who had striven to heal him through her borrowed aphorisms.

"To think," she began, "to think he should escape, after being over there--over there, John, in blood and dirt and death--and come home to be shot in the back by a tramp with a gun! Where is the man? You detained him, didn't you? Don't tell me you let him go."

"I know where to find him," Raven temporized. "He'd no idea of going."

She insisted.

"You think it was an accident? He couldn't have had a grudge. d.i.c.k hadn't an enemy."

"You can make your mind easy about that," said Raven, taking refuge in a detached sincerity. "It wasn't meant for d.i.c.k. He was as far from the fellow's thoughts as the moon."

He remembered the fringe of somber woods and the curve of the new moon.

"It isn't so much the misfortunes of life," Milly kept on. She was beating her knee now with one closed hand and her voice kept time. "It's the chances, the horrible way things come and knock you down because you're in their path. If he doesn't"--here she stopped and Raven knew she added, in her own mind, "if he doesn't live--I shall never believe in anything again. Never, John, never!"

Raven was silent, not only because it seemed well for her to free her mind, but because he had a sudden curiosity to hear more. This was Milly outside her armor at last. When she had caught him out of his armor, she had proposed sending him to the Psychopathic, and here she was herself, raving against heaven and earth as unrestrainedly as a savage woman might beat her head against a cliff.