The Red Pirogue/Chapter 1

OUNG 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 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.

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

He waded until the swift water was half way between his belt and his shoulders, then plunged forward and swam out and up to ward 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.

What 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 smoke house. 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 rivet.

“Jack O'Dell! Guncotton Jack! Tallyho! 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 all 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 bed-rooms, 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.