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If you can't for the sake o' me, you hear to me for the sake o' him, sleepin' there, the pitifullest little creatur' God ever made. How's he goin' to meet things, as he is? 'Twould be hard enough with a father 'n' mother that set by him as they did their lives, but you half-crazed about him what'll he do, Isr'el? What'll the poor little creatur' do?"
"He says Isr'el Tenney ain't so much of a man, when all's said an' done, an' don't seem as if he could stan' seein' him on his knees. But there!" Raven went on through the shed and up the road, to Nan's. She had seen him from the window and came down the path. "Knew I'd come, did you?" he grumbled. "Yes," said Nan. "We'd really better go."
And each time Tenney returned shortly, and they were sure his going was a blind. He never went to the street, and even Charlotte remarked the strangeness of his short absences. "What under the sun makes Isr'el Tenney start out an' turn round an' come back ag'in?" she inquired of Jerry. "He ain't gone twenty minutes 'fore he's home." Jerry didn't know. He "'sposed Isr'el forgot suthin'."
"I'll lay no b finger on this to-morrow, Isr'el!" cried Morel. "Oh, well, if tha wunna, somebody else'll ha'e to," said Israel. Then Morel continued to strike. "Hey-up there LOOSE-A'!" cried the men, leaving the next stall. Morel continued to strike. "Tha'll happen catch me up," said Barker, departing. When he had gone, Morel, left alone, felt savage. He had not finished his job.
For, I says, if He was there with me in the shack, He'll go with me when I go, an' my place is to home. An' there was a light in the kitchen, an' I looked in through the winder an' Isr'el was there. He was kneelin' before a chair, an' his head was on his hands an' through the winder I heard him groan.
There was the moon flooding the little room, and in the doorway stood a figure. "That you, Isr'el?" she called clearly. "Yes," he said, and then hesitated, "you all right?" "Yes," she answered, in the same clear voice, with something commanding in it now. "We're all right. You go back to bed, so's to git your sleep. I'll call you if I'm up first."
I always tell folks I've got five child'n, counting Mr. Martin the youngest. The more bluster they have, the more boys they be. Now Marthy knew that about brother Isr'el, an' she always ruled him by love an' easin' of him down from them high perches he was always settin' upon. Everything was always right with her an' all wrong with him when they was young, but she could always say the right word."
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.
"'Twould be nothin' but wormwood for me, an' well he knows it. He don't love me, Isr'el." She hesitated before the word, and with it the thought of Raven came to her, as she saw him, unvaryingly kind and standing for quiet, steadfast things. "He hates me." "Hates ye," he repeated curiously. "What's he hate ye for?"
She could not go on. It had always seemed to her a wrong to the baby to put the vile suspicion into words. "If you think," she tried again, "what you said this mornin' O Isr'el, I've been as true to you as you are to your God." He was religious, she often told herself, chiefly in her puzzled musings after a "spell" was over, and this was the strongest vow she could imagine.
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