THE RED PIROGUE

A TALE OF ADVENTURE IN THE CANADIAN WILDS

STORIES BY

Captain Theodore Goodridge Roberts

Comrades of the Trails

The Red Feathers

Flying Plover

The Fighting Starkleys

Tom Akerley

The Red Pirogue

L. C. PAGE & COMPANY (Inc.)

53 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.

“UP CAME THE RAGING WATERS, UP AND PAST THE JUMPING, SQUIRMING CANOE.”

The RED PIROGUE

A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian Wilds

RELATED BY

Captain Theodore Goodridge Roberts

Author of “The Fighting Starkleys,” “Comrades of the Trails,”

“Red Feathers,” “Tom Akerley,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY

Frank T. Merrill

BOSTON

L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY

(INCORPORATED)

MDCCCCXXIV

Copyright, 1922,

By Street & Smith Corporation

Copyright, 1924,

By L. C. Page & Company

(INCORPORATED)

All rights reserved

Made in U.S.A.

First Impression, January, 1924

PRINTED BY C. H. SIMONDS COMPANY

BOSTON, MASS., U. S. A.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE RED PIROGUE

CHAPTER I
A QUEER FISH

Young Ben O’Dell emerged from the woodshed into the dew and the dawning day with a paddle in his hand, crossed a strip of orchard, passed through a thicket of alders and choke cherries and between two great willows and descended a steep bank to a beach of sand and pebbles. Thin mist still crawled in wisps on the sliding surface of the river. Eastward, downstream, sky and hills and water were awash and afire with the pink and gold and burnished silver of the new day.

Ben was as agreeably conscious of the scents of the place and hour as of the beloved sights and sounds. He sniffed the faint fragrance of running water, the sweeter breath of clover blooms, the sharper scent of pennyroyal. He could even detect and distinguish the mild, dank odors of dew-wet willow bark, of stranded cedar blocks and of the lush-green stems of black rice and duck grass.

He crossed the beach to the gray sixteen-foot pirogue which was used for knocking about between the point and the island and for tending the salmon net. It wasn’t much of a craft—just a stick of pine shaped by ax and draw knife and hollowed by ax and fire—but it saved Uncle Jim McAllister’s canvas canoe much wear and tear. It was heavy and “crank,” but it was tough.

Ben launched the pirogue with a long, grinding shove, stepped aboard and went sliding out across the current toward the stakes and floats of the net. The upper rim of the sun was above the horizon by now and the shine and golden glory of it dazzled his eyes.

It was now that Ben first noticed the other pirogue. He thought it was a log, but only for a moment. Shading his eyes with his hand he made out the man-cut lines and the paint-red glow. It was a pirogue sure enough and the largest one Ben had ever seen. It was fully twenty-five feet long, deep and bulky in proportion and painted red from end to end. It lay motionless on the upper side of the net, caught lengthwise against the stout stakes.

Ben, still standing, dipped his long paddle a dozen times and in a minute he was near enough to the strange pirogue to look into it. The thing which he saw there caused him to step crookedly and violently backward; and before he realized what he had done the crank little dugout had rolled with a snap and he was under water.

He came to the surface beside his own craft which had righted but was full of water and no more than just afloat. He swam it into shallow water, pushed it aground, threw his paddle ashore and then turned again to the river and the big red pirogue lying motionless against the net stakes.

“Nothing to be scared of,” he said. “Don’t know why I jumped like that. Fool trick!”

He kicked off his loose brogans one by one, dipped for them and threw them ashore.

The sun was up now and the light was brighter. The last shred of mist was gone from the river.

“FOR A FEW SECONDS THE TWO GAZED IN SILENCE.”

“It startled me, that was all,” he said. “It would startle any man—Uncle Jim himself, even.”

He waded until the swift water was halfway between his belt and his shoulders, then plunged forward and swam out and up toward the red pirogue. He hadn’t far to go, but now the current was against him. He made it in a few minutes, however. He gripped a gunnel of the big dugout with both hands and hoisted himself high and looked inboard. At the same moment the occupant of the strange craft sat up and stared at him with round eyes. For a few seconds the two gazed in silence.

“Who are you?” asked the occupant of the red pirogue.

“I’m Ben O’Dell,” replied the youth in the water, smiling encouragingly and brushing aside a bang of wet hair. “I live on the point when I’m not away downriver at school. I was surprised when I first saw you—so surprised that I upset and had to swim.”

“Is that O’Dell’s Point?” asked the other.

“Yes. You can’t see the house for those big willows on the bank.”

“Are you Mrs. O’Dell’s boy?”

“Yes, I’m her son. I’m not so small as I look with just my head out of water. I guess I’d better climb in, if you don’t mind, and paddle you ashore.”

“You may climb in, if you want to—but I can paddle myself all right.”

“Is she steady? Can I put all my weight on one side, or must I get in over the end?”

“She’s steady as a scow.”

Ben pulled himself up and scrambled in. A paddle lay aft. He took it up and stroked for the shore.

“It was a funny place to find you,” he ventured.

“Why funny?” she asked gravely.

“Well—queer. A little girl all alone in a big pirogue and caught against the net stakes.”

“I’m eleven years old. I caught the pirogue there on purpose because I thought I was getting near to O’Dell’s Point and I was afraid to land in the dark.”

“Do you know my mother?”

“No-o—not herself—but I have a letter of intr’duction to her.”

They stepped ashore and crossed the beach side by side. Ben felt bewildered, despite his eighteen years of life and six feet of loosely jointed height. This small girl astonished and puzzled him with her gravity that verged on the tragic, her assured and superior manners, her shabby attire and her cool talk of “a letter of intr’duction.” He possessed a keen sense of humor but he did not smile. Even the letter of introduction struck him as being pathetic rather than funny. He was touched by pity and curiosity and profoundly bewildered.

They climbed the steep, short bank.

“You are big,” she remarked gravely as they passed between the old apple trees. “Bigger than lots of grown men. I thought you were just a little boy when I couldn’t see anything but your head. You must be quite old.”

“I’m eighteen; and I’m going to college this fall—if mother makes me. But I’d sooner stop home and work with Uncle Jim,” he replied.

At that moment they cleared the orchard and came upon the ell and woodshed of the wide gray house and Mr. James McAllister in the door of the shed. McAllister backed and vanished in the snap of a finger.

“He is shy with strangers, but he’s a brave man and a good one,” said Ben.

Mrs. O’Dell appeared in the doorway just then.

“Mother, here’s a little girl who came from somewhere or other in a big red pirogue,” said Ben. “I found her out at the net. She has a letter for you.”

Mrs. O’Dell was a tall woman of forty, slender and strong, with the blue eyes and warm brown hair of the McAllisters. She wore a cotton dress of one of the changing shades of blue of her eyes, trim and fresh. The dress was open at the throat and the sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. She stepped forward without a moment’s hesitation and laid a strong hand lightly on one of the little girl’s thin shoulders. She smiled and the blue of her eyes darkened and softened.

“A letter for me, dear?” she queried.

“Yes Mrs. O’Dell—from dad,” replied the stranger.

“You are Richard Sherwood’s little girl?”

“Yes, I’m Marion.”

“And you came alone? Not all the way from French River?”

“Most of the way—alone. I—dad——”

Ben became suddenly aware of the fact that the queer little girl was crying. She was still looking steadily up into his mother’s face but tears were brimming her eyes and sparkling on her cheeks and her lips were trembling. He turned away in pained confusion. For several minutes he stared fixedly at the foliage and green apples of the orchard; when he ventured to turn again he found himself alone.

Ben passed through the woodshed into the kitchen. There he found his uncle frying pancakes in a fever of distracted effort, spilling batter, scorching cakes and perspiring.

“Where are they?” he asked.

Uncle Jim motioned toward an inner door with the long knife with which he was working so hard and accomplishing so little. Ben took the knife away from him, cleared the griddle of smoking ruins and scraped it clean.

“You didn’t grease it,” he said. “I’ll handle the pork and do the turning and you handle the batter.”

This arrangement worked satisfactorily.

“Where’d you find her, Ben?” whispered McAllister.

“In a big pirogue drifted against the stakes of our net,” replied the youth. “She was asleep when I first glimpsed her and I thought it was somebody dead. It gave me a start, I can tell you.”

“It sure would. Well, I reckon she’s as queer a fish as was ever taken in a salmon net on this river.”

“It was a queer place to find her, all right. Who’s Richard Sherwood, Uncle Jim? Do you know him? How did mother come to guess who she was?”

“I used to know him. All of us did for a few years, a long time ago. He was quality, the same as your pa—but he wasn’t steady like your pa.”

“Quality? You mean he was a gentleman?”

“That’s what he’d ought to been, anyhow—but I reckon the woods up French River, and one thing and another, were too much for his gentility. Ssh! Here they come!”

Mrs. O’Dell and little Marion Sherwood entered the kitchen hand in hand. The eyes of both wore a suggestion of recent tears and hasty bathing with cold water, but both were smiling, though the little girl’s smile was tremulous and uncertain.

“Jim, this is Dick Sherwood’s daughter,” said the woman. “You and Dick were great friends in the old days, weren’t you?”

“We sure was,” returned McAllister awkwardly but cordially. “He was as smart a man in the water as ever I saw. Could dive and swim like an otter. And a master hand with a gun! He could shoot birds a-flying easier’n I could hit ’em on the ground. John was a good shot, too, but he wasn’t a match for your pa, little girl. I hope he keeps in good health.”

“Yes, thank you,” whispered Marion.

“Marion’s pa has left French River for a little while on business, and Marion will make her home with us until he returns,” said Mrs. O’Dell.

There was bacon for breakfast as well as buckwheat pancakes, and there were hot biscuits and strawberry preserves and cream to top off with. The elders did most of the talking. Marion sat beside Jim McAllister, on his left. Jim, having taken his cue from his sister, racked his memory for nice things to say of Richard Sherwood. He sang Sherwood’s prowess in field and stream. At last, spooning his preserves with his right hand, he let his left hand rest on his knee beneath the edge of the table.

“And brave!” he said. “You couldn’t scare him! I never knew any man so brave as Dick Sherwood except only John O’Dell.”

Then a queer change of expression came over his face. Young Ben, who was watching his uncle from the other side of the table, noticed it instantly. The blue eyes widened; the drooping mustache twitched; the lower jaw sagged and a vivid flush ascended throat and chin and cheek beneath the tough tan of wind and sun. Ben wondered.

Breakfast over, the man and youth went outside, for there were potatoes to be hilled and turnips to be thinned.

“What was the matter with you, Uncle Jim?” inquired Ben.

“Me? When?” asked McAllister.

“Just a little while ago. Just after you said how brave Mr. Sherwood was—from that on. You looked sort of dazed and moonstruck.”

“Moonstruck, hey? Well, I’ll tell you, Ben, seeing as it’s you. That little girl took a-holt of my hand when I said that about her pa. And she kept right on a-holding of it.”

“Girls must be queer. I knew something was wrong, you looked so foolish. But if her father was such a fine man as you tried to make out at breakfast, what’s the matter with him? You told me that the woods had been too much for his gentility, Uncle Jim.”

“Sure it was—the woods or something; but he was smart and brave all the same when I knew him. I wasn’t lying; but I’ll admit I was telling all the good of him I could think up, so’s to hearten the poor little girl. It worked, too.”

“Do you know why he left French River? And why did he leave her to come all that way alone?”

“I’ll ask Flora, first chance I get. I’m just as curious as yerself, Ben.”

They were halfway to the potatoes with their earthy hoes on their shoulders when Ben halted suddenly and faced his uncle with an abashed grin.

“I forgot to tend the net,” he said. “It may be full of salmon for all I know—and all the salmon full of eels by this time.”

McAllister’s long, lean frame jerked with laughter.

“That suits me fine, Ben,” he exclaimed as soon as he could speak. “We’ll go tend it now. I’d sooner be on the river this fine morning than hilling potatoes, anyhow; and maybe we’ll find another grilse from French River.”

Uncle Jim was impressed by the red pirogue. He had seen bigger ones but not many of them. In the days of his unsettled and adventurous youth, when he was a “white-water boy,” chopping in the woods every winter and “stream-driving” logs every spring, he had once helped to shape and dig out a thirty-five-foot pirogue. But that had been close onto fifty miles farther upriver and back in the days of big pine timber.

“She’s a sockdolager, all right,” he said. “Didn’t know there was any such pines left on French River. What’s underneath the blankets, aft there?”

Ben stepped into the grounded craft, went aft and lifted the blankets, disclosing a lumpy sack tied at the neck with twine, a battered leather gun case and a bundle wrapped in a rubber ground sheet and securely tied about with rope.

“It’s her dunnage!” exclaimed Uncle Jim. “Off you walked and left it laying! You’re a fine feller to catch a young lady in a net, you ain’t! Where was your wits, Ben?”

“I was upset, that’s a sure thing,” admitted the youth. “And I’m still a good deal puzzled about these Sherwoods,” he added.

In the net they found four salmon, three still sound and one already fallen a prey to devouring eels. Several eels had entered the largest fish by way of the gills and mouth and what had been salmon was now more eel. The silver skin was undamaged and the eels were still inside.

With Marion Sherwood’s baggage, the salmon and the skinful of eels, Ben and his uncle had to make two trips from the river to the house. The eels were thrown to the hogs as they were, alive and in their attractive container. The undamaged fish were cleaned, salted and hung in the smokehouse. During that operation and the journey to the potato field and between brisk bouts of hoe work, James McAllister told his nephew most of what he knew of the Sherwoods of French River.

Mr. Richard Sherwood first appeared at O’Dell’s Point twenty-six years ago when James McAllister was only twenty years of age. He was direct from England, by way of the big town sixty miles downriver. He arrived with three loaded canoes and six Maliseet canoemen from the reservation near Kingstown and jumped knee-deep into the water before the canoes could make the shore and set up a shout that started the echoes on the far side of the river.

“Jack O’Dell. Guncotton Jack! Tally-ho! Steady the Buffs!”

The Maliseets wondered; the mowers on island and mainland ceased their labors to give ear; and John O’Dell, in the orchard, hooked his scythe into the crotch of an apple tree and started for the beach at top speed with Jim McAllister close at his heels. O’Dell went down the bank in two jumps. The stranger saw him and splashed ashore. They met halfway between the willows and the water and shook hands two-handed. They were certainly glad to see each other.

That was how Richard Sherwood came to O’Dell’s Point. He was a fine-looking young man, red and brown, with a swagger in his shoulders and a laugh in his dark eyes. But all the world was young then. Even Captain John O’Dell was only twenty-six.

Sherwood had been a lieutenant in O’Dell’s company of the second battalion of the Buffs. The two young men had served together in a hill war in India; and Sherwood had been present when O’Dell, refusing to accept another volunteer after three had been shot down, had advanced with a cigarette between his lips and lighted the fuse of the charge of guncotton which the first volunteer had placed under the gate of the fort. He had lighted the fuse with the coal of his cigarette, while the entire garrison shot down at him and his men shot up at the garrison and then had turned and walked downhill to the nearest cover with blood flowing down his neck, the top gone from his helmet, the guard of his sheathed sword smashed on his hip and a slug of lead in the calf of his right leg—still smoking the cigarette.

John O’Dell had resigned his commission soon after the death of his father and returned home to Canada and his widowed mother and the wide gray house at O’Dell’s Point. That had been just two years before Richard Sherwood’s arrival on the river.

Sherwood lived with the O’Dells until December. He was a live wire. He worked on the farm, swam in the river, shot duck and partridge and snipe, hunted moose and made a number of trips upstream in search of land to buy and settle on. He wanted thousands of acres. He had big but somewhat confused ideas of what he wanted. He liked the life. It was brisk and wild. He confided to young Jim McAllister that he wouldn’t object to its being even brisker and wilder than he found it in the vicinity of O’Dell’s Point. The O’Dells, he said, were just a trifle too conscious of their duty toward, and superiority to, the lesser people of the river.

Jim McAllister admired Sherwood vastly in those days and was with him on the river and in the woods as often as possible. The McAllisters lived in the next house above the point. The family consisted then of Ian and Jim and Agnes and Flora and their parents and a grandfather.

They were not like the O’Dells exactly, those McAllisters, but they were just as good in their own way. Their habitation was less than the O’Dell house by four bedrooms, a gun room, a library and a drawing-room with two fireplaces; and their farm was of one hundred and sixty acres against the square mile of mainland and forty-acre island of the O’Dells. And yet the two families were loyal friends of long standing. The first McAllister to settle on the river one hundred and ten years ago had been a sergeant in the regiment of which the first O’Dell had been the commanding officer.

Jim McAllister took Mr. Richard Sherwood upriver in December, twenty-six years ago, to introduce him to some of the mysteries of trapping fur. Sherwood was restless and traveled fast. After a time they struck French River at a point about ten miles from its mouth and within a few hundred yards of the log house of Louis Balenger. Balenger had Iroquois blood in his veins and was from the big northern province of Quebec. He had come to French River with his family five or six years before, traveling light and fast. When Jim McAllister saw where he was he urged Sherwood to keep right on, for Balenger had the reputation of being a dangerous man.

But Louis sighted them and hailed them, ran to meet them and had them within the log walls of his house as quick as winking. And there was rum on the table and the fire on the hearth burned cheerily and Mrs. Balenger said that dinner would be ready in half an hour. The dinner was plentiful and well cooked, the eyes of the Balenger girls were big and black and bright and the conversation of Louis was pure entertainment though somewhat mixed in language.

That was the beginning of Richard Sherwood’s fall from grace in the eyes of the O’Dells and McAllisters and most other people of unmixed white blood on the big river. Jim McAllister returned to O’Dell’s Point alone; and even he had turned his back reluctantly on the exciting hospitality of the big log house. Even as it was, he had remained under that fateful roof long enough to lose the price of a good young horse to his merry host at poker. He made all haste down the white path of French River for ten miles and then down the wider white way of the big river for twenty miles and reported to his friend John O’Dell before showing himself to his own family.

Captain O’Dell gave Jim two hours in which to rest, eat and rub the snowshoe cramps out of his legs with hot bear’s grease; and then the two of them headed for French River, backtracking on Jim’s trail which had scarcely had time to cool. They reached Balenger’s house next day, before noon. Mrs. Balenger opened the door to them and welcomed them in. Jim McAllister followed John O’Dell reluctantly into the big living room. There sat Sherwood and Balenger at a table beside the wide hearth with cards in their hands, just as Jim had last seen them two days before.

Louis Balenger laid down his cards, sprang to his feet and advanced to meet the visitors. He expressed the honor which he felt at this neighborly attention on the part of the distinguished Captain O’Dell. But Richard Sherwood did not move. John O’Dell was very polite and cold as ice and dry as sand. He bowed gravely to Madame Balenger and her daughters, refused a glass of punch from the hand of Louis on the plea that he was already overheated and requested Dick Sherwood to settle for the play and come along. Sherwood refused to budge. He was angry and sulky.

O’Dell’s Point saw nothing more of Richard Sherwood for nine long months. He appeared one August evening in a bark canoe, spent the night with the O’Dells and headed upriver again early next morning, swearing more like a river-bred “white-water boy” than an English gentleman. The captain told Jim McAllister something of what had passed between himself and Sherwood. Sherwood, it seems, had lost all his little property—the price of a good farm, at least—to Louis Balenger, and he had wanted a few hundred dollars to set about winning it all back with.

John had refused to lend him money for poker but had offered him land and stock and a home and help if he would cut his acquaintance with Louis Balenger and the entire Balenger tribe. Sherwood refused to consider any such offer, said that Delphine Balenger was worth more than all the other inhabitants of the country rolled together and that he would not lose sight of her even if he had to work his fingers to the bone in the service of Louis, and went away in a raging temper.

Once a year, for eight years, John O’Dell tried to get Sherwood away from the Balengers and French River but always in vain. Sherwood worked for Louis and according to Louis’ own methods; and as he was always the goat he was frequently on the run from the wardens of the game laws.

Down at O’Dell’s Point life went on evenly and honestly and yet with a fine dash of romance. Captain John O’Dell wooed and wed Flora McAllister and Jim McAllister was jilted by a girl at Hood’s Ferry and several elderly people died peacefully. Up on French River, Delphine Balenger ran away with a lumberman from the States after Dick Sherwood had spent ten years in slavery and disgrace for love of her; and Sherwood set out on the lumberman’s track with murder in his heart. He lost his way and was found and brought home by Delphine’s younger sister. Then Sherwood quarreled with Louis Balenger and Louis shot him twice, left the Englishman for dead and vanished from French River forever. Julie Balenger nursed poor Sherwood back to life and strength and, soon after, married him.

This is what Uncle Jim told young Ben O’Dell of the Sherwoods of French River.

CHAPTER II
THE DRIFTING FIRE

When the little Sherwood girl first saw the library she did not believe her eyes. It was not a large room, and there were not more than six hundred volumes on the shelves; but Marion had to pull out and examine a score of the books before she believed that the rest were real. She had not known that there was so much printed paper in the whole world. She had seen only three books before this discovery of the O’Dell library, the three from which her father had taught her to read. He had told her of others and she had pictured the book wealth of the world on one shelf three feet long.

Ben O’Dell looked into the library through one of the open windows.

“Have you read ‘Coral Island’?” he asked.

Marion shook her head.

“It’s good,” continued Ben. “But ‘Treasure Island’ is better. They are both on my shelves, farther along. ‘Midshipman Easy’ is fine, too—but perhaps it’s too old for you. Have you read many books?”

“I’ve read three,” she replied. “Dad taught me to read them. He taught Julie and me to read at the same time, and he said we were very clever. He could read as easy as anything.”

“Who is Julie?” he asked.

“She is my mother,” replied the little girl, with averted face. “They taught me to call her Julie when I was a baby and they used to laugh. She—she was ill two years ago—and I haven’t seen her since—because she’s in Heaven.”

Ben’s face grew red with pity and embarrassment; for a minute both were silent. He found his voice first.

“What books have you read?” he asked.

“‘Rob Roy,’ by Sir Walter Scott,” she answered in a tremulous whisper which scarcely reached him. “It was quite a big book, in green covers—and I liked it best of all. And ‘Infantry Training.’ It was a little red book. Julie and I didn’t find it very interesting. The third was ‘The Army List.’ It had dad’s name in it and your father’s too, and hundreds and hundreds of names of other officers of the king.”

“But—you read those—‘Infantry Training’ and ‘The Army List’?”

“Yes—plenty of times.”

“And only one story like ‘Rob Roy’?”

“We hadn’t any more.”

Ben O’Dell leaned his hoe against the side of the house and hoisted himself through the open window. The little girl looked at him; but, knowing that there were tears in her eyes he did not meet her glance. Instead, he took her by the hand and led her across the room to his own particular shelves of books.

“Here’s what I used to read when I was your age,” he said. “I read them even now, sometimes. ‘Treasure Island’—you’ll like that.” He drew it out and laid it on the floor. “‘From Powder Monkey to Admiral,’ ‘My Friend Smith,’ ‘The Lady or the Tiger,’ ‘Red Fox,’ ‘The Gold Bug,’ ‘The Black Arrow,’ ‘Robbery Under Arms,’ ‘Davy and the Goblin’—you’ll like all these.”

The little girl stared speechless at the pile of books on the floor. Ben recrossed the room, climbed through the window and reshouldered his hoe. He met Uncle Jim at the near edge of the potato patch.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” said McAllister. “I don’t want to take any advantage of you by starting in at these spuds ahead of you.”

“I stopped a minute to show the little Sherwood girl some good books to read,” explained the youth.

“Can she read?” asked Uncle Jim. “How would she learn to read, way up there on French River?”

“Her father taught her. He taught her and her mother to read at the same time. And her mother’s dead. I’m sorry for that kid, Uncle Jim. Mighty tough, it seems to me—no mother—and to be left all alone in a big pirogue by her father. I’d like to know why he did that.”

“So would I,” returned McAllister. “I asked your ma and she didn’t seem to know exactly. Couldn’t make out anything particular from the letter nor from what the little girl told her—but it’s something real serious, I guess. He had to run, anyhow. He is fond of the little girl, no doubt about it. His letter to Flora told that much. And he was mighty fond of his wife too, I reckon; and I wouldn’t wonder if there wasn’t more good in him than what we figured on, after all. He had wild blood in him, I guess; and Louis Balenger was sure a bad feller to get mixed up with.”

They worked in silence for half an hour, hilling the potatoes side by side.

“I’d like to know why he left her in the pirogue. Why he didn’t bring her all the way,” said Ben, pausing and leaning on his hoe.

“How far down did he bring her?” returned McAllister.

“I don’t know.”

“Likely he was scared. Maybe the wardens were close onto his heels. It looks like he figgered on just coming part way with her, by his having the letter to your ma already written.”

Again they fell to work and for ten minutes the hoes were busy. Then McAllister straightened his back.

“It’s years since I was last on French River,” he said. “I’d like fine to take another look at that country. We’d maybe learn something we don’t know if we got right on the ground. We wouldn’t have to be gone for long. Two days up, one day for scouting ’round and one day for the run home—four or five days would be plenty.”

“When can we go?”

“Not before haying, that’s a sure thing. Between haying and harvest is the best time, I reckon. I feel real curious about Dick Sherwood’s affairs now—more curious than I’ve felt for years.”

“He sounds mighty interesting to me! and I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that you were wrong when you said the woods had been too much for his gentility, Uncle Jim.”

“Neither would I, myself. But how d’ye figger it, Ben?”

“Well, the little girl has good manners.”

“She sure has! I never saw a little girl with better manners. I’m hoping her pa hasn’t done something they can jail him for—or if he has, that they can’t catch ’im. I’m all for keeping the laws—even the game laws—but maybe if I’d lived on French River along with Louis Balenger instead of at O’Dell’s Point alongside O’Dells all my life, I’d be busy this minute keeping a jump ahead of the wardens instead of hilling potatoes. You never can tell. There’s more to shootin’ a moose in close season nor the twitch of the finger. There’s many an outlaw running the woods who would have been an honest farmer like yer Uncle Jim if only he’d been born a McAllister and been bred alongside the O’Dells.”

“I’ve been thinking that myself,” returned Ben gravely. “Environment, that’s it! The influence of environment.”

“It sure sounds right to me, all right,” said McAllister. “We’ll call it that, anyhow; and we won’t forget that Dick Sherwood taught his little girl good manners and how to read.”

The thought of getting away from the duties of the farm for a few days was a pleasant one to both the honest farmer and his big nephew. Jim McAllister was not an enthusiastic agriculturalist. He loved the country and he didn’t object to an occasional bout of strenuous toil; but the unadventurous round of milking and weeding and hoeing day after day bored him extremely even now in his forty-sixth year. But for the mild excitement of the salmon net in the river and his love for his widowed sister and his nephew and his respect for the memory of the late Captain John O’Dell he would long ago have turned his back on the implements of husbandry and taken to the woods.

Young Ben, on the other hand, was keen about farm work. He preferred it to school work. He was young enough to find excitement where none was perceptible to his uncle. He loved all growing things, but he loved cattle more than crops, horses more than cows. The practical side of farm life was dear to him and he took pleasure in the duties which seemed humdrum to his uncle; but the side issues, the sporting features, were even dearer. He loved the river better than the meadow and he saw eye to eye with McAllister in the matter of the salmon net. A flying duck set his blood flying and the reek of burned powder on the air of a frosty morning was the most delicious scent he knew. He loved wood smoke under trees and the click of an iron-shod canoe pole on pebbles, and the tracks of wild animals in mud and snow. The prospect of a visit to French River was far from unwelcome to him.

That was an unusually warm night, without a breath of air on O’Dell’s Point. Ben went to bed at ten o’clock and somehow let three mosquitoes into his room with him. He undressed, extinguished his lamp and lay sweltering in his pajamas on the outside of his bed. Then the mosquitoes tuned their horns and sounded the charge. They lasted nearly half an hour; by the time they were dead Ben was wider awake than he had been at any time during the day. He went to the window and looked out at the sky of faint stars and the vague dark of the curving river. His glance was straight ahead at first, then eastward downstream.

Ben saw a light, a red light, drifting on the black river. His first thought was that it might be some one with a lantern, but in a moment he saw that the light could not be that of a lantern, for it grew and sparks began to fly from it. A torch, perhaps. The torch of a salmon spearer? Not likely! For years it had been unlawful to kill salmon or bass with the spear and there was no lawbreaker on the river possessed of sufficient hardihood to light his torch within sight of O’Dell’s Point. More than this, the light was running with the current; and it was increasing every moment in height and length far beyond the dimensions of any torch.

Ben groped for his shoes and picked them up, felt his way cautiously out of the room and down the back stairs. In the woodshed he put on his shoes and equipped himself with paddle and pole. Then he ran for the river, ducking under the boughs of the old apple trees and descending the bank in a jump and a slide. Dim as the light was he saw that the big pirogue was gone before he reached the edge of the water. The sixteen-footer was there but nothing was to be seen of the giant from French River. He looked downstream and saw the light which had attracted him from his window vanishing behind the head of the island, out in the channel. It was like a floating camp fire by this time.

Ben threw pole and paddle into the sixteen-footer, ran her into the water and leaped aboard. He shot her straight across the current for a distance of several hundred yards, until he was clear of the head of the island, then swung down on the track of the drifting fire. He paddled hard, urged by a very natural curiosity. This and the disappearance of the red pirogue from the point and the fact that he was out on the dark river in his pajamas instead of tossing on his hot bed, thrilled him pleasantly.

He drew steadily down upon the fire which was now leaping high and tossing up showers of sparks and trailing blood-red reflections on the black water. As he drew yet nearer he heard the crackle of its burning and the hiss of embers in the water. He heard a dog barking off on the southern shore. He heard the roaring breath of the fire and felt its heat. He swerved slightly and drew abreast of it.

He saw that the fire was in a boat of some sort, that the vessel was full of flame and crowned with flame, that it was heaped high from bow to stern with blazing driftwood and dry brush. The lines of the craft showed black and clear-cut between the leaping red and yellow of the flames above and the sliding red of the water below. He looked more intently and recognized the lines and bulk of the big red pirogue.

The red pirogue, the property of his mother’s guest, adrift and afire in the middle of the river! Who had dared to do this thing? No neighbor, that was certain. Canoes, nets, all sorts of gear, were as safe on the beach at O’Dell’s Point as in the house itself. This must be the work of a stranger and of an insane one, at that.

Ben continued to drift abreast of the red pirogue and watch it burn. He kept just out of range of the showering sparks and the scorching heat. He felt indignant and puzzled. But for the assurance of his own eyes he could not have believed that any inhabitant of the valley possessed sufficient temerity thus to remove property from O’Dell land and destroy it. If he should ever discover the identity of the offender he would make him regret the action, by thunder! He would show him that the O’Dells were not all dead. No other theft of such importance as this had been made on the O’Dell front in a hundred years. But could this be properly classed as a theft? It seemed to Ben more like an act inspired by insolence than the performance of a person driven by greed or necessity.

“Hello! Hello!” hailed a voice from the gloom on the right.

“Hello,” answered Ben, turning his face toward the sound.

A small sturgeon boat appeared in the circle of fierce light, paddled by a square-shouldered old man with square whiskers whom Ben recognized as Tim Hood of Hood’s Ferry.

“THE OLD MAN DREW ALONGSIDE AND PEERED AT BEN.”

“Hold hard there!” cried Hood. “What pranks be ye up to now?”

“Pranks? What are you talking about?” returned the youth.

The old man drew alongside and peered at Ben, shading his eyes with a hand against the glare of the fire.

“Oh, it’s yerself!” he exclaimed. “Well, what d’ye know about this here? What be the joke an’ who be the joker?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” replied Ben, turning again to contemplate the drifting fire.

The mass of wood had settled considerably by this time and was now a mound of hot crimson and orange with low flames running over it. The gunnels of the pirogue were burning swiftly, edging the long mass of glowing embers with a hedge of livelier flame. The big pirogue hissed from end to end and was girdled by misty puffs of steam.

“Looks to me like a pirogue,” said old Tim Hood. “A big one, like the ones we uster make afore all the big pine was cut off hereabouts.”

Ben was about to tell what he knew but he checked himself. Pride and perhaps something else prompted him to keep quiet. Why should he admit to this old ferryman that some one on the river had dared to take a pirogue from the O’Dell front? Very likely it would amuse Hood to believe that the influence of this distinguished family for honesty and order was waning, for the ferryman was the only person within ten miles of O’Dell’s Point who had ever openly denied the virtue of the things for which the O’Dells of the Point had stood for more than a hundred years. During Captain John’s term of occupation, and even in the days of Ben’s grandfather, Tim Hood had openly derided the elegant condescension of the O’Dell manners and the purity of the O’Dell speech and made light of learning, military rank and romantic traditions. So Ben did not tell the old man that the pirogue had been set adrift from O’Dell’s Point.

“I saw it from my bedroom window and couldn’t make out what it was,” he said.

“Same here,” replied Hood. “An’ whatever it was, it won’t be even that much longer.”

He swung the sturgeon boat around and paddled away into the gloom.

Ben also deserted the fated pirogue which was now shrouded in a cloud of steam. He backed and headed his sluggish craft for the bulky darkness of the left shore.

“I’m glad I didn’t tell him,” he reflected. “He’d have laughed and sneered, the way he does about everything he doesn’t know anything about. And I’m mighty glad I didn’t say anything about the little girl—about her coming to the point all alone and me finding her drifted against the net stakes. He’d have made the worst of that—would have said Sherwood had run away and deserted her and sneered at both of them.”

When he got into shallow water he headed upstream and exchanged the paddle for the pole. He had paddled and drifted far below the tail of the little island. The water was not swift and the bottom was firm. He poled easily, keeping close inshore. He searched his knowledge of his neighbors and his somewhat limited experience of life and human nature for a solution of the puzzle and for a reason for the removal and destruction of the red pirogue. But he failed to see light. The more he thought of it, the more utterly unreasonable it seemed to him. It was a mystery; and he had inherited a taste for the mysterious with his McAllister blood.

Upon reaching the tail of the island Ben kept to his course and entered the thoroughfare between the island and the left shore. Here the shallow water ran swiftly over sand and bright pebbles in a narrow passage. In some places the water was so shoal that Ben had to heave straight down on the pole to scrape over and in other places it eddied in deep pits in which water-logged driftwood lay rotting and big eels squirmed. Both the island shore and the mainland shore were grown thick and tall with willows, water maples and elms. Under the faint stars the thoroughfare was black as the inside of a hat.

Ben was almost through the dark passage, almost abreast of the head of the island, when he thrust the pole vigorously into seven feet of water instead of into seven inches and lost his balance. The crank little pirogue did the rest and Ben went into the hole with a mighty splash. He came to the surface in a second, overtook the drifting craft in a few strokes and herded it into shallow water under the wooded bank. He waded hurriedly toward the stranded bow and collided with something alive—something large and alive.

Ben was staggered, physically and in other ways, for several seconds. Then he pulled himself together, shook his O’Dell courage to the fore and jumped straight with extended arms. But the thing was gone. He stumbled, recovered his balance and listened breathlessly. Thing? It was a man! He had felt clothing and smelled tobacco. He heard a rustle at the top of the bank and instantly dashed for the sound. But the bank was steep and tangled with willows. He ripped his pajamas, he scratched his skin and finally he lost his footing and rolled back to the stranded dugout. He stepped aboard, pushed off and completed his journey.

Uncle Jim smote Ben’s door with his knuckles next morning, as usual, and passed on his way down the back stairs. Ben sighed in his sleep and slept on. Mrs. O’Dell came to the door twenty minutes later and was surprised to find it still closed. She knocked and received no answer. She opened the door and looked into the little room. There was Ben sound asleep, his face a picture of health and contentment. The mother smiled with love and maternal pride.

“He is so big and young, he needs a great deal of sleep,” she murmured.

Her loving glance moved from his face and she saw the front of his sleeping jacket above the edge of the sheet and her eyes widened. The breast of the jacket was ripped in three places and stained in spots and splashes with brown and green. And on one of his long arms a red scratch ran from wrist to elbow.

“Ben!” she cried.

He opened his eyes, smiled and sat up.

“Look at your arm!” she exclaimed. “And your jacket is torn! What has happened to you, Ben dear?”

Then he remembered and told her all about his midnight adventure. She sat on the edge of his bed and listened gravely. The more she heard, the graver she became.

“I bet the man I bumped into is the one who did it,” concluded Ben.

“Yes—but I can’t think what to make of it,” she said. “Something queer is going on. Perhaps an enemy of poor Mr. Sherwood’s is lurking around. I shall tell Jim, but nobody else.”

“The little girl will ask about her red pirogue some day,” said Ben. “It was a fine pirogue—the best I ever saw.”

“We must try not to let her know that it was willfully burned,” replied his mother. “The poor child has suffered quite enough without knowing that her father has an enemy mean enough to do a thing like that. We must see that no harm comes to her, Ben.”

CHAPTER III
THE STRANGE BEHAVIOR OF DOGS AND MEN

Five days after the burning of the red pirogue, another queer thing happened at O’Dell’s Point. It happened between three and five o’clock of the afternoon.

Jim McAllister had driven off downstream early that morning with two horses and a heavy wagon to buy provisions at the town of Woodstock. The round trip was an all-day job. Ben O’Dell shouldered an ax after dinner and, accompanied by the youngest of the three O’Dell dogs, went back to mend a brush fence and see if the highest hay field was ripe for the scythe. Mrs. O’Dell and little Marion Sherwood washed and dried the dinner dishes and Mrs. O’Dell took a great ham from the oven and set it to cool in the pantry. At three o’clock she and the little girl took an armful of books to the old orchard between the house and the river. Red Lily went with them; Red Chief, the oldest of the O’Dell setters, remained asleep in the kitchen.

Mrs. O’Dell and the little girl from French River returned to the house at five o’clock, having finished “Treasure Island.” Red Chief arose from his slumbers and welcomed them with sweeps of his plumed tail. Mrs. O’Dell went to the pantry to see how the ham looked—and the ham wasn’t there!

Some one had been in the pantry, had come and gone by way of the kitchen, and yet Red Chief had not barked. Mrs. O’Dell was not only puzzled but alarmed. A thief had visited the house of the O’Dells, a thing that had not happened for generations; and, worse still, a dog of the famous old red strain had failed in his duty. And yet Red Chief had many times proved himself as good a dog as any of his ancestors had been. Red Chief, the wise and true and fearless, had permitted a thief to enter and leave the house without so much as giving tongue. It was a puzzling and disturbing thought to the woman who held the honor of her dead husband’s family so high that even the honor of the O’Dell red dogs was dear to her.

She said nothing about the stolen ham to her little guest but she took the old setter by his silken ears and gazed searchingly into his unwavering eyes. But there was neither guile nor shame in those eyes. Devotion, courage, vision and entire self-satisfaction were there. The old dog’s conscience was clear.

Mrs. O’Dell went through the pantry. Two loaves of bread had gone with the ham. She searched here and there through the rest of the house but could not see that anything else had been taken. Nothing of value was gone, that was certain, and she felt less insecure though as deeply puzzled. She decided not to mention the vanished food and the old dog’s strange passivity to her son or her brother.

A week passed over O’Dell’s Point without an unusual incident. Ben and Uncle Jim commenced haying in the early upland fields; and then O’Dell’s Point received its first official visit from the law. Ben brought the horses in at noon, watered them and followed them into the cool and shadowy stable; and there he found Mel Lunt and a stranger smoking cigars. Ben was startled, for he knew Mel Lunt to be the local constable; and the consciousness of being startled drove away his natural shyness and added to his indignation at the glowing cigars. His eyes brightened and his cheeks reddened.

“Young man, what do you know about Richard Sherwood?” asked the stranger, stepping forward and knocking the ash from his cigar.

“We don’t smoke in here, if you don’t mind,” said the overgrown youth. “It isn’t safe.”

“This here’s Mr. Brown from Woodstock, Ben,” said Lunt hastily. “He’s depity sheriff of the county.”

“Mel’s said it. Don’t you worry about the cigars, young man, but tell me what you know, an’ all you know, about Richard Sherwood.”

Ben’s face grew redder and his throat dry.

“I must ask you—again—not to smoke—in this stable,” he replied, in cracked and jerky tones.

“Yer stalling, young feller!” exclaimed the stranger. “Tell me what I’m asking you an’ tell it straight. Yer trying to hide something.”

Jim McAllister stepped into the stable at that moment.

“Sure he’s trying to hide something, Dave Brown,” said McAllister. “He’s trying to hide what he thinks of you for a deputy sheriff—that you’re as ignorant as you are fresh. He’s remembering his manners and trying to hide your want of them. He’s half O’Dell an’ half McAllister; so if you two want to talk in this stable about Richard Sherwood or anything else, I guess you’d better go out first and douse those cigars in a puddle or something.”

“I’m here in the name of the law, Jim McAllister,” said Mr. Brown, uncertainly.

“Same here, only more so,” returned Uncle Jim pleasantly.

“He’s in the right of it, Mr. Brown,” said Mel Lunt.

The officials left the stable, ground their cigars to extinction with the heels of their boots and came back.

“Yer darned particular,” remarked the deputy sheriff.

“Nothing out of the way,” returned McAllister.

“Well, we’re looking for Richard Sherwood from French River,” said the other. “He cleared out a couple of weeks ago an’ took his little girl with him. She’s gone too, anyhow. I heard he used to be a friend of the folks living here, so I come to ask if you’d seen him in the last two weeks. I didn’t come to set yer darned stable afire.”

“No, we haven’t seen Sherwood,” replied McAllister. “What’s the trouble? Has he taken to poaching again?”

“It’s worse than poaching, this time. I was up on French River ten days ago, taking a look over the salmon pools and one thing an’ another, to see if the game wardens were onto their job, an’ darn it all if I didn’t trip over a bran’ new grave in a little clearing. There’s an old Injun who calls himself Noel Sabattis lives there, an’ he told me he’d buried a dead man there a few days ago. I asked questions and he answered them; and then he helped me dig—and there was a man who’d been shot through the heart!”

“You don’t say!” exclaimed McAllister. “Who was he?”

“Louis Balenger.”

“Balenger? What would bring him back, I wonder? What else did you find out?”

“Nothing. We’re looking for Richard Sherwood.”

“What has he ever done that would lead you to suspect him of a thing like that? I used to know him and he was no more the kind to kill a man than I am. Did the old Injun say Sherwood did it?”

“No, not him. He wouldn’t say a word against Sherwood. But he don’t matter much, one way or the other, old Noel Sabattis! He ain’t all there, I guess. He says he found Balenger in Sherwood’s pirogue, dead, when Sherwood and the little girl were off trout fishing. When Sherwood come back he helped Noel dig the grave; and next day he lit out and took the girl with him—so that Injun says.”

“Why don’t you blame it on the Injun?”

“He didn’t run away.”

“That’s so. Well, we haven’t seen Richard Sherwood around here.”

“Nor anything belonging to him, I suppose?”

Jim McAllister scratched his chin.

“We have seen his daughter,” said Ben O’Dell, with dignity. “She is our guest. She’s in the house now, with my mother. She’s only a little girl—only eleven years old—and I hope you don’t intend to question her about Balenger’s death.”

“That’s what I heard. She’s stopping here, you say, but you ain’t seen her father. That’s queer. How’d she come?”

Ben told of his discovery of the pirogue and the girl against the stakes of the salmon net, but he did not mention the letter which the little voyager had brought to his mother. That letter, whatever it contained, seemed to him entirely too private and purely social a matter to be handed over to the inspection of a deputy sheriff.

“Did she come down all the way from French River alone, a little girl of eleven?” asked Brown. “Is that what ye’re trying to stuff into me?”

“You can’t talk to Ben like that,” interrupted McAllister. “He’s a quiet lad but he’s an O’Dell—and if you’d been born and bred on this river you’d know what I mean. Ask Lunt.”

“That’s right,” said Lunt. “The O’Dells hev always been like that. If they tell anything, it’s true—but I ain’t sayin’ as they always tell all that they know. Now Ben here says the girl was alone when he found her, but he ain’t said that he knows she come all the way from French River alone by herself. How about that, Ben?”

“She told me that her father came part way with her,” said Ben.

“How far?” asked the deputy sheriff.

“She didn’t tell me.”

“Well, maybe she’ll tell me.”

“No, she won’t—because you won’t ask her that or anything like it,” said young O’Dell.

“What d’ye mean, I won’t ask her?”

“There you go again!” interrupted Jim McAllister. “Didn’t I tell you that Ben here’s an O’Dell?”

“Well, what about it? I’m the deputy sheriff of this county and O’Dells are nothing to me when I’m in the performance of my duty.”

“Let me try to explain,” said Ben, crimson with embarrassment and the agitation of his fighting blood. “I respect the laws, Mr. Brown, and I observe them. I was taught to respect them. But I was also taught to respect other laws—kinds that you have nothing to do with—officially. Laws of hospitality—that sort of thing. My father was a good citizen—and a good soldier—and I try to do what I think he would do under the same circumstances. So if you attempt to question that—that little girl—my mother’s guest—about her father—whom you’re hunting for a murderer—I’ll consider it my—unpleasant duty to knock the stuffing out of you!”

The deputy sheriff stared in amazement.

“Say, that would take some knocking!” he retorted. “How old are you, young feller?”

“I’m going on eighteen,” replied Ben quietly.

“And you think you can best me in a fight?”

“Yes, I think I can. I’m bigger than you and longer in the reach—and I’m pretty good.”

“But yer sappy. And yer all joints. I’m no giant but I’m weathered. The milk’s out of my bones.”

“My joints are all right, Mr. Brown. You won’t find anything wrong with them if you start in questioning that little Sherwood girl about her father.”

“I wasn’t born on this river,” said the deputy sheriff, “and I’m a peaceful citizen with a wife an’ children in Woodstock, but I consider myself as good a sportsman as any O’Dell who ever waved a sword or a pitchfork. There’s more man in me than deputy sheriff. I’ll fight you, Ben, for I like yer crazy ideas; and if you trim me I’ll go away without asking the girl a single question about her father. But if I trim you I’ll question her.”

Ben looked at his uncle and the lids of McAllister’s left eye fluttered swiftly.

“That wouldn’t be fair,” said Ben, turning again to Brown. “And I can’t make it fair, for I’m determined that you shall not worry my mother’s guest, whatever happens. If you did manage to beat me, there’d still be Uncle Jim. So you wouldn’t get a square deal.”

Brown looked at McAllister.

“Does he mean that you would object to me asking the girl a few civil questions?” he inquired.

“Sure, I’d object,” said McAllister.

“But you ain’t one of these O’Dells!”

“I’m a McAllister—the same kind even if not exactly the same quality.”

Mr. Brown looked puzzled.

“I’m a little above the average myself,” he said thoughtfully. “Tell me why you two’ve got to bellyaching so about me wanting to ask that little girl a few questions, will you? Maybe I’m stupid.”

“Suppose some fool of a sheriff found a dead man and thought you’d killed him and found out where you’d run to from one of your own kids,” said McAllister. “The kid loves you, wouldn’t hurt you for a fortune, but in her innocence she tells what the sheriff wants to know and he catches you. And we’ll suppose you did it and they prove it on you. Nice game to play on your little daughter, wouldn’t it be?”

The deputy sheriff turned to Mel Lunt.

“How does it strike you, Mel?” he asked.