"It ain't hangin' up," said Tenney, with a particularity that seemed to cause him an intense pain of concentration. "She never'd hang it up with t'others. It's folded. Mebbe in her work-basket, mebbe—my God in heaven! she wouldn't ha' kep' it. She's burnt it up. You take off the cover o' the kitchen stove. You look there an' see if you can't find the leastest scrid. Blue, you remember, all folded up."
Raven went into the kitchen where the pails of milk were on the table, waiting. He took off the stove cover and looked in, still an idle compliance, to quiet the man's mind. It was like an outcome to a dream. For there it was, a soft disorder easily indicating burned cloth, and one shred of blue, a piece perhaps an inch and a half square, hemmed on three sides: the end of an apron string. He took this carefully out, and stood there looking at it a tense moment, as if it could summon Tira back to tell him what it meant; look out his pocketbook, laid it in, and put the pocketbook away. Then he went back to Tenney.
"You were right," he said. "She burned it up."
Tenney stared at him for what seemed a long time.
"Oh," he said, as if it had been Raven who suggested it, "so she burnt it up. Wa'n't there any left—not a scrid?"
"Yes," said Raven, "there was. What do you want of it?"
"Nothin'," said Tenney. "No, I don't want it. If 'twas the whole on't I shouldn't want it, come to think. A man couldn't hang himself by an apron. Even that one you couldn't. I guess"—he turned upon Raven so sick a gaze that Raven advanced to him and put a hand on his arm—"I guess," said Tenney, "I'm done. I've got to git some sleep. Should you jest as soon I'd go up to that shack o' yourn an' lay down a spell?"
Again they went up to the hut, and Tenney, throwing himself on the couch, was at once asleep. All that day Raven watched by him, and that night also they were there together: a strange day and night, Raven remembered afterward, with Charlotte coming and Nan and finally Dick, all with food or wistful companionship, and Nan's assuring him, in her way of finding nothing out of the common, that everything had been done for Tira, and she would go over to the service. Charlotte would go with her. It would be better—her eyes questioned him, and he nodded, not answering. It would be better he should not go. On the third day she appeared again, in the middle of the afternoon, and said she had just come from Mountain Brook and everything was——That she did not finish, Tenney's somber eyes waited upon her with such a dumb expectancy. What was going to be done, she wondered. Tenney couldn't stay in the hut, keeping Raven there with him, as Billy Jones had kept Old Crow. Yet she wasn't sure Raven wouldn't stay. But while she thought it, Tenney was answering her, though he didn't seem to be speaking to either of them. He might have been appealing to something invisible in the room.
"I'll shave me," he said, "an' then I'll see." Something passed over him like a great moving wind. "Why, God A'mighty!" he cried. "I can't stop to shave me. It's now or never, don't you know 'tis?"
He snatched his hat from the chair where he had thrown it, and went out of the hut, limping down the hill. And Raven was with him. He was with him as he hurried along the road so fast that it seemed as if the next step meant breaking into a run. He was with him when, halfway to the street, Eugene Martin passed them, in his buggy, stopped further on and called to them: "Ride?" He was not laughing now, he was not jibing. He seemed to be constrained to ask them to ride, they were hurrying so. Raven threw a curse at him, but Tenney broke into a limping run and jumped into the tail of the wagon and sat there, his legs dangling. And he called so piercingly to Martin to drive along, to "Hurry, for God's sake, hurry!" that Martin did whip up, and the wagon whirled away, and Raven hurried on alone.