must be got out of the way, and that also was before him. But in
her amazing habit of knowing, she knew.

"No," she said, "she ain't b'en near. She won't leave Tenney. She's one
o' them that sticks by."

Immediately he was curious to hear what she had imagined, how she knew.
Was the neighborhood awake to even the most obscure local drama? While
Tira thought she was, at the expense of her own safety, covering
Tenney's wildness of jealousy, were they all walking in the sun?

"Who told you?" he asked her.

"Why, nobody," said Charlotte. "It didn't take no tellin'. Jerry heard
him hollerin' after her that day you was up in the woods, an' when you
kep' the loggin' road broke, I knew you was givin' her some kind of a
hole to creep into."

So they had known, she and Jerry. But they had not told. They would
never tell.

"One thing," said Charlotte, smoothing her apron and looking at him in
an anxious interrogation, "what be we goin' to say? That was the first
thing doctor asked: 'Who done it?' (You know I let him in.) ''Twas a
poor crazed creatur,' says I, 'after pa'tridges.' I was goin' to say
Dick had a gun an' tripped up over a root; but that never'd do in the
world, shot in the back so."

"The partridges'll do for the present," said Raven grimly. "He's
certainly crazy enough. He said he was shooting partridges. We'll take
it at that."

Charlotte went on, and he sat thinking. So Tira had chosen not to come.
So fixed was his mind on the stern exigency of the situation, as it now
stood, that her disobedience in itself irritated him. The right of
decision, as he reasoned, had passed out of her hands into his. He was,
in a sense, holding the converging lines of all this sudden confusion;
he was her commanding officer. At that moment, when he was recognizing
his anger against her and far from palliating, cherishing it as one of
the tools in his hand, to keep him safely away from enfeebling doubt,
Milly came noiselessly down the stairs. She would, he realized, in her
unflinching determination to do the efficient thing, be as silent as a
shadow. She appeared in the doorway, and her face, her bearing, were no
longer Milly's. This was a paper semblance of a woman, drawn on her
lines, but made to express grief and terror. Quiet as she was, the shock
had thrown her out of her studied calm. She was elemental woman,
despising the rigidities of training, scourged into revolt. Even her
dress, though fitted to the technical needs