Charlotte stood there watching him out of the yard and noted that he turned toward home. When Nan and Dick came up the road the other way, she had gone in, and they had been in the house five minutes or more before she knew of it. Then Dick wandered into the kitchen, on one of the vague quests always bringing the family there in search of her, and she called to him from the pantry: "D'you see anything of Isr'el Tenney on the road?" No, Dick had seen nobody. He stood leaning against the casing, watching her floury hands at their deft work. "He come here, not ten minutes ago," said Charlotte, "after your Uncle John. He had a gun. I never see Isr'el Tenney with a gun. 'Pa'tridge shootin,' he said. Pa'tridges, when you can't see your hand afore you in the woods! I told him Uncle John'd gone up to the hut. When Uncle John went off, he said he wanted Nan should come up there, quick as ever she could. You tell her, won't you? I forgot." Then Dick knew. Tira was up there. And Tenney was out with a gun: New England tragedy. It was impossible, the sanctimonious Tenney. Yet there was New England tragedy, a streak of it, darkly visible, through all New England life. It would be ridiculous: old Tenney with his prayer-meetings and his wild appeals. And yet, he reflected, all tragedy was ridiculous to the sane, and saw before his mind's eye a satiric poem wherein he should arraign the great sad stories of the world and prove their ironic futility. But all this was the hurried commentary of the mind really bent on something actual, and from that actuality he spoke: "Don't tell Nan, Charlotte. I'll see what he wants." 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 Dick had had time to come down again. And this was how Dick 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 Dick 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."