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It was two days after he had begun to use his crutches, that Tira, after doing the noon chores in the barn and house, sat by the front window in her afternoon dress, a tidy housewife. The baby was having his nap and Tenney, at the other window, his crutch against the chair beside him, was opening the weekly paper that morning come.
She tried to smile at him with composure, including Tira in the friendliness of it, but Tira, oblivious of her, was staring at Tenney, and Nan found herself outside, trouble in her mind. Tira had not gone to the door with her. She had staid still staring, in that fixed interrogation, at Tenney. He looked at her now, met her eyes, and gave a little grimace. He had done well, the movement said.
"We'll be over, 'long about four o'clock, Jerry or I." Then, for he had forgotten Tenney, in his awareness of her, he remembered to ask: "The doctor came, did he?" She nodded gravely. "Say anything?" She shook her head, and then offered, it seemed unwillingly: "He thought he might be laid up quite a spell."
Tenney did not answer, and Raven, striding along the road, listened with all possible intentness to hear whether husband and wife spoke together. He thought not, but he did hear the closing of a door. Thyatira this was her name, and she was called Tira passed her husband apparently without a glance.
"Now," he said, "I want you to come with me down to Nan's" still he dared not put her off a step from the intimacy of neighborly relations by presenting Nan more formally "and spend the night there. In the morning, you'll go back to Boston with her. I shall enter a complaint against your husband." It wasn't so hard to give Tenney the intimacy of that name, now she looked so sweetly calm.
The blood came again to her face. She had almost, she felt, spoken Raven's name, and a swift intuition told her she must bury even the thought of it. "There ain't," she said, "two nicer folks in this township than Charlotte an' Jerry, nor two that's readier to turn a hand." Tenney was silent, and Jerry did the chores and went home.
Tira leaned back in her chair and yawned with the simplicity of the natural animal. Tenney caught his breath, the redness of her mouth and the gleam of her teeth were so bewitching to him. He got up and carried away the Bible. When he came back from the best room she was moving about, setting away chairs and then brushing up the few chips on the hearth.
A number of days were spent at Fort Defiance in attempting to arrive at an understanding with the Navajo. Hamblin wrote, "through Ammon M. Tenney being able to converse in Spanish, we accomplished much good." On the way home, in a Hopi village, were met Barbenceta and also a number of chiefs who had not been at Fort Defiance.
But he spoke with a mildness of courtesy surprising to her and evidently the more alarming to Tira, for she shook the more and the vine appallingly knew and kept her company. "I'm obleeged to ye," said Tenney. "But I don't want nothin' done for me nor mine. He's mine, ye see.
They were coming on briskly, Nan and a tall figure at the other side of the road. She had seen Raven and called, clearly, though not with any implication of relief: "That you, Rookie?" He came up to them and saw, with a surprise out of all proportion to the event, in this neighborhood where anybody might join anybody else in familiar intercourse, that it was Tenney.
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