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 Dick 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 Dick 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 Dick 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 assure 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 Dick: 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, nobody," 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 apron 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 Dick had a gun an' tripped up over a root; but that never'd do in the world, shot in the back so."