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Updated: June 11, 2025
Tira slipped from under his hand and continued her ordered tasks about the room. But she smiled at him in the friendliest way. "Oh, no," she said, "I ain't the leastest mite afraid." She laughed a little, in a manner mystifying to him, for it suddenly seemed to her she should never be afraid of anything again.
Raven had forgotten Tira up there in the lonesome woods, forgotten a day was very near when she would have to make one more of her desperate decisions. He was thinking of Old Crow. He went on reading: "There is no need of going into old Billy's sickness. It made a great change in my life.
I told him the last I see o' Tira was yesterday afternoon standin' in her own door, an' he asked if she had her things on an' I didn't know what to say. An' he said somebody down the road said you went by 'fore light, drivin' like blazes. An' you had a woman in the car. An' Tira'd run away."
And he had by no means escaped yet. Wasn't Anne inexorably by his side now, when he turned for an instant from the problem of Tira, saying noiselessly, this invisible force that was Anne: "What are you going to do about my last wish, my last command? You are thinking about Nan, about that strange woman, about yourself. Think about me."
This was the voice that had echoed through the woods that day when Tira stood, her baby in her arms, in what chill of fear Raven believed he knew. Tenney went on lashing himself into the ecstasy of his emotional debauch. His eyes glittered. He was happy, he asserted, because he had found salvation. His conversion was akin to that of Saul.
He had not taken off his hat, and he sat there, hands clasped upon the stick Raven had tossed him, his head bent over them. He looked like a man far gone in age and misery, and Tira, returning from the bedroom, the child in her arms, felt a mounting of compassion and was no longer afraid. She laid the child in its cradle and, with a cheerful clatter, put wood in the stove.
But the key: that was a weapon in itself. She could not get into her house without it. Tenney could not get in. So far as Tira was concerned, it was lost, and Tenney would have to be told. And as he turned into the other road, there was Tenney himself driving toward home, and Martin knew what he was to do. "Hi!" he called, but Tenney did not stop.
Brahma must have thought she was pretty smart to lay three without having them stolen away from her. Tira put the eggs carefully in her apron pocket and hurried down the ladder, and out to the basket waiting on the ground. How many eggs did he want to make even dozens? Did he tell her? She could not remember. Probably he had forgotten himself, by now.
And still the brown arms spin in an ever-nearing mist of spray; and the outer sand-bar is not far off, and there is shouting Mateo, leaping in the surf, swinging something about his head, as a vaquero swings his noose! ... Sough! splash! it struggles in the trough beside Feliu, and the sinewy hand descends upon it. Tiene! tira, Miguel! And their feet touch land again! ...
It was squalid, it was unclean, and he found his mind crying out: "Help me! for God's sake help me!" But it was not to God he cried. It was to Old Crow. And Old Crow heard. Indubitably he heard. For there was an answer. "Yes! yes!" the answer kept beating in his mind. He would help. And what of Tira? Was she resolved into the earth that made her? Or would she also help?
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