Then, he assumed, Tenney would go home by the back road, the shortest route. For he would not find the key, which was still in Raven's pocket. Tenney looked at him, seemed to have something to say, and finally managed it. As Raven remembered, it was something about pa'tridges and his gun. Whether he was shaken by fright, one could not have told, but he was, as Charlotte remarked upon it afterward, "all to pieces." Raven ignored the mumble, whatever it was, and Tenney, finally understanding that he might as well be as far off the earth as Dick, for all the attention anybody was going to pay him, turned, limping, and then Raven, with that mechanical sensitiveness to physical need always awake in him now, caught up a stick lying in the dooryard and tossed it to him. "Here!" said he. "That'll do for a cane." 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.