"John Raven. Is he to home?"

"Why, no," said Charlotte. "Not round the house. He said he's goin' up
to the hut."

At that he stared at her desperately, as if begging her to take back her
words; they might have been a command to him, a verdict against him. She
stepped out a pace.

"Why, Mr. Tenney," she said, "what you round with a gun for, this time
o' night? You can't see nothin'. It'll be dusk in a minute."

"Pa'tridges," he called back to her, adding darkly, "I guess I can see
well enough, come to that."

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