, as if to
emphasize his callousness to the gash in it, and once he tapped it with
the crutch, while the baby lay there asleep, and set it rocking. Tira,
cooking at the table, felt her heart stand still. An actual weapon she
could flee from, but was this a weapon? The uncertainty was in itself
terrifying.

It was the day he set the cradle rocking that she awoke in the night,
her fear full upon her. He was at her side, sleeping heavily. The baby
was on her other arm. Yet it seemed to her that the menace from Tenney
had pierced her to reach the child and, on its passage, stabbed through
her racing heart. Then her temptation came upon her, so simple a thing
she seemed stupid never to have thought of it before. She rose to a
sitting posture, put her feet out of bed, took the child, and carried
him with her into the sitting-room. She laid him on the couch and
covered him, and then stole back into the bedroom. The crutch was there,
in its habitual place at night, leaning against the foot of the bed. She
could put her hand on it in the dark. Tenney, too, she had begun to
reflect, could put his hand on it. What deeds might he not do with it in
those hours when the sanities of life also sleep? She took it gently and
went out again through the sitting-room and kitchen into the shed. Her
purpose had been to hide it behind the wood. But if he came on it there,
it would not be a crutch he found. It would be a weapon. She put her
hand on an upright beam, as she stood painfully thinking it out, and
touched the handle of a saw, hanging there on a nail; immediately she
knew. She went back into the kitchen, lighted the lantern and carried it
into the shed. There stood the crutch leaning against the beam below the
saw, a weapon beyond doubt. She set down her lantern, laid the crutch on
the block Tenney used to split kindlings, set her foot upon it and
methodically sawed it into stove wood lengths. When it was done she
gathered up the pieces, carried them into the sitting-room, to the stove
where Tenney always, in winter weather, left a log to smoulder, dropped
them in and opened the draught. Then she went back to the shed, swept up
her scattering of sawdust, hung the saw in its place, gave a glance
about her to see that everything was in its usual order, and returned
into the kitchen. She put out the lantern, hung it on its nail, went
into the sitting-room and partially shut the draft on the noisy blaze.
She did not dare quite shut it, le