Tenney laughed. It was not the laugh of the man who had just left them. There was no light mockery in it, but a low intensity of misery, the cynical recognition of a man whose house has been destroyed and who asks his inner self how he could have expected anything different. But when he spoke it was jeeringly, to Tira.
"Go into the house," he mocked. "Didn't ye hear him? He tells ye to go into the house, into my house, so's he can fight it out ag'in same's he done with t'other one. You better go. He won't git no odds from me."
He set his dinner pail down beside him, and his hand moved a few inches along the helve of his axe. And Raven, like Tira, was sorry for him.
"No," said Tira, "I sha'n't go into the house. An' this to-do ain't so much about me as about you, Isr'el Tenney, because you're makin' a fool o' yourself. You'll be town talk, an' you deserve to be. You've brought it on yourself."
Raven, his eyes on the man's face, saw it change slightly: something tremulous had come into it, though it might have been only surprise. The hand on the axe helve shook perceptibly. Now it looked to Raven as if it might be his turn.
"I came up here this morning," he said, "to see her." Curiously, at the moment of saying "your wife," he balked at it. He would not, even by the sanction of the word, seem to give her over to him.
"Yes," said Tenney. The lividness of anger tautened his face. "You see me off to my work. You knew you'd find her here."
"Yes," said Raven. "I knew I should find her. I had to see her alone, because I wanted to ask her to leave you, go away from here, and be safe."
Tenney stared at him. The brusque fact was too much for him. Why should Raven have told it?
"You are known," Raven continued steadily, "to abuse your wife."