"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, snatched some blankets from the bedroom and came out again. Tira stepped aside to let him pass. It looked as if he would have walked over her. He covered Dick warmly, picked up the boy's glasses from the snow and dropped them into his pocket. With that involuntary act, the emotional assault of the whole thing nearly had him. He remembered Dick's eyes as he had sometimes seen them without their glasses, 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 assaulted 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 Dick 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.