The Red Pirogue/Chapter 4

Mrs. O'Dell ceased to worry about the mysterious thefts and the red setters' failures in duty when her son presently told her what he had heard from the deputy sheriff of the tragedy on French River. Now all her anxiety was for the little girl who had come to her so trustingly in the big pirogue, the little girl whose mother was dead and whose father was a fugitive from the police. She pitied Sherwood, too, but her mental attitude toward him was more confused than her son's.

Ben refused to believe for a moment that Dick Sherwood had shot his enemy Louis Balenger or any other unarmed man. His reasoning was simple almost to childishness. Balenger had evidently been shot from cover and when in no position to defend himself; and that, and the fact that Sherwood had been John O'Dell's friend for years, were proof enough for Ben that Sherwood was innocent of Louis Balenger's death.

Jim McAllister wasn't so sure, but he suspected that the old Indian, Sabattis, had put something over on Sherwood as well as on the deputy sheriff and constable. Jim had known Dick Sherwood as a good sportsman; had seen him laugh at fatigue and danger; had watched him work with young dogs and young horses, training them to the gun and the bit, gentle and understanding. Jim admitted that there was wild blood in Sherwood, but no mean blood. A man like Sherwood might be fooled by a clever rascal like Balenger into forgetting some of the social duties and niceties of his kind—yes, even to the extent of breaking a game law occasionally under pressure. But it would be dead against his nature to draw trigger on an unarmed man. Jim maintained that Sherwood had been nobody's enemy but his own. But to the question of why he had run away, if innocent, he could find no answer.

Ben had an answer—but it was so vague and obscure that he had not yet found words in which to express it.

Mrs. O'Dell did not try to weaken her son's and brother's belief in the fugitive's innocence. But her knowledge of human nature was deeper than theirs both by instinct and experience. She did not judge Sherwood in her heart, however, or voice her thought that he was probably guilty. He had been guilty of lesser crimes, lesser madnesses. He had forgotten his traditions and turned his back on his old friends. He had followed his wild whims at the expense of his duty to life and in the knowledge of better things; and she suspected that such a course might, in time, lead even a gentleman to worse offenses than infringements of the game laws. But she knew that he loved his child and had loved the child's mother. And so she felt nothing for him but pity.

In the short note which little Marion had brought from her father Sherwood stated his innocence of Balenger's death far more emphatically than he wrote of his love for his daughter and her mother. And yet Flora O'Dell believed in his love for the little girl and the dead woman and was not at all sure of his innocence.

The deputy sheriff and the local constable returned to O'Dell's Point within two days of their first visit. They confronted Ben and Uncle Jim as the two farmers descended to the barn floor from the top of a load of hay.

“Look a here, young feller, why didn't you tell me all you knew about that pirogue?” demanded Mr. Brown in a nasty voice, with a nasty glint in his eyes. “You went an' made yerself out the champion man of honor an' truth teller in the world an' then you went an' lied to me!”

“What was the lie?” asked Ben.

“You said somebody stole Sherwood's pirogue.”

“Took it off our front, that's what I said.”

“No use arguing. The pirogue was filled up with dry wood and set afire, and you know it! And you know who set her afire! Out with it—an' save yerself from jail. I'm listening.”

“Old Tim Hood has been talking to you, I suppose.”

“Yes, he has.”

“Then you know as much about it as I do—and maybe more. Yes, and maybe more, if you know all he knows—for he's the only person I can think of around here who'd have the cheek to take anything off our front and destroy it.”

“Cheek! Come off the roof! I got yer measure now, young man; so tell me why you set that pirogue afire, and be quick about it.”

“I didn't set it afire, I tell you! I saw it burning from my bedroom window and paddled down after it and took a look at it. Tim Hood came out in a sturgeon boat to take a look, too. That's all I know about it.”

“Say, d'ye see any green in my eye?”

“Easy there, Dave Brown!” cautioned McAllister. “You know all Ben knows about the burning of that blasted pirogue now—and now you go asking him about yer eye. What's the sense in that? That's not the way to handle a lad like Ben.”

“Cut it out, Jim McAllister! You can't put any more of that high-an'-mighty, too-good-to-sneeze O'Dell slush over on me. I fell for it once, but once was enough, O'Dell! Save it to fool Injuns with!”

Ben's face was as colorless as his shirt.

“You've done it now,” said McAllister grimly.

“I reckon ye've went a mite too far, Mr. Brown,” said Mel Lunt.

“Come into the next barn, where there's more room,” said young Ben O'Dell in a cracked voice.

“I'm not fighting to-day, I'm arresting,” replied Brown.

“Arresting any one in particular?” asked Uncle Jim.

“This young man.”

“What for?”

“I suspect him of burning Sherwood's pirogue with the intention of destroying evidence.”

Mel Lunt shook his head. McAllister laughed. Ben stood straight and grim, waiting.

“You are a deputy sheriff, Dave Brown, but you ain't the law,” said McAllister. “You don't know the law—nor you don't know this river—and somebody's been filling you up with hot air. What you need is a licking to kind of clear yer brain. After that, you can tell Judge Smith down at Woodstock all about it—and see what happens. Ben's the doctor. Will you take your treatment here or in the other barn where there's more room?”

Mr. Brown lost his temper then, turned and hurled himself at Ben. Ben sent him back with a left to the chest and a right to the ribs.

“Yer in the wrong of it, Mr. Brown,” complained the constable. “I warned ye that Tim Hood was sartain to git ye in wrong.”

The deputy sheriff paid no attention to Lunt but made a backward pass with his right hand. Ben jumped at the same instant. There was a brief, wrenching struggle; and then the youth leaped back and dropped an automatic pistol at his uncle's feet. McAllister placed a foot on the weapon. Again Brown rushed upon Ben and again he staggered back. There was no room for circling or side-stepping in the narrow space between the load of hay and the hay-filled bays. It had to be action front or quit.

The deputy sheriff was shaken but not hurt, for young O'Dell had spared his face. He lowered his head and charged like a ram. Ben gave ground before that unsportsmanlike onset; and, alas for Mr. Brown's nose and upper lip, he gave more than ground.

“Ye'd best quit right now,” wailed Mel Lunt. “Yer gittin' all messed up an' ye ain't in yer rights an' folks'll maybe think as I was mixed up in it too.”

Brown made a fourth attack and tried to obtain a wrestler's hold low down on the overgrown youth; but Ben, cool as a butter firkin in a cellar, hooked him off. Brown charged yet again, and then once more, and then sat down on the floor.

They bathed his face and held cold water for him to drink. Ben fetched sticking plaster from the house, covertly, and applied strips of it here and there to his late antagonist's damaged face.

“Never see such a hammerin' since Alec Todd fit Mike Kane up to Kane's Lake twenty year ago,” said Mel Lunt, extracting crushed cigars from his superior's vest pockets. “But them two fit with feet an' everything, an' Ben here didn't use nothin' but his hands. I reckon they larn ye more'n joggofy where ye've been to school. Dang me if even his watch ain't stopped!”

The deputy sheriff and the constable drove away fifteen minutes later, the deputy sheriff sagging heavily against his companion's shoulder.

“Now they'll maybe let us get along with the haying,” remarked McAllister.

“And perhaps he will get along with his own job of hunting for the man who shot Balenger, instead of wasting his time talking about that pirogue,” said Ben. “How would the pirogue help him? What did he mean by speaking of it as evidence?”

“Old Tim Hood's put that crazy notion into his head, where there's plenty of room for crazy notions,” replied the uncle. “Old Tim's a trouble hunter and always was—a master hand at hunting trouble for other people. And he don't like the O'Dells and never did. Yer gran'pa gave him a caning once, a regular dusting, for starving an old horse to death.”

“Do you think I'll have to go to jail for fighting Brown?” asked Ben with ill-concealed anxiety. “It would be a blow to mother—but I don't see what else I could do but fight him, after the things he said.”

“Now don't you worry about that,” said McAllister, smiling “Brown hasn't much sense but he's got a lot of vanity—and a little ordinary horse sense too, of course. He and Mel Lunt are busy this very minute making up as likely sounding a story as they can manage between them all about how he fell down on his face.”

Nothing more was seen or heard of the deputy sheriff at O'Dell's Point. He evidently carried his investigations farther afield. No further inquiries were made concerning the fate of the big, red pirogue. Nothing more was heard of Louis Balenger or Richard Sherwood.

But more bread vanished from the pantry and again the red dogs failed to give the alarm. And the stolen books reappeared in their exact places on the library shelves.

The little girl was kept in ignorance of the suspicions against her absent father and also of the thefts of food and the mysterious borrowing of the books. The others discussed the situation frequently, but always after she had gone to bed. Ben was of the opinion that Richard Sherwood was in hiding somewhere within a few miles of the house and that it was he who had helped himself from the pantry and library. He held to this opinion in spite of the behavior of the dogs.

His mother and uncle believed otherwise. They maintained that Sherwood, innocent or guilty, would go farther than to O'Dell's Point for a place in which to hide from the police. Otherwise, why run at all? they argued. He had started well ahead of the chase, judging by what they had heard, with plenty of time to get clear out of the province. Jim believed that the food and books had been taken by an Indian. He knew several Indians in the neighborhood who could read and more who were sometimes hungry because they were too lazy to work; and they were all on friendly terms with the dogs. A sick Indian would ask for food, but a well one wouldn't for fear that a little job of work might be offered him. Haying was the last time in the year to expect one of those fellows to come around asking for anything. As for the books, an Indian who was queer enough to want to read would be queer enough to take the books on the quiet and return them on the sly. That's how James McAllister figured it out.

The last load of hay was hauled in and Ben told his mother of the contemplated trip up to French River. She replied that she was afraid to be left alone with little Marion Sherwood in a house which neither doors nor dogs seemed able to guard. Ben had not thought of this, for he felt no suggestion of violence, of any sort of menace, in the mild depredations of the mysterious visitor.

“I'm sorry that I'm not as brave as I used to be,” said Mrs. O'Dell. “I want you to have your trip. Perhaps your Uncle Ian will sleep here while you two are away. He is sometimes very reasonable and unselfish, you know, and this may be one of the times.”

Ben crossed lots to the old McAllister homestead two miles above the point, where Ian McAllister, a fifty-year-old bachelor, lived in manly discomfort and an atmosphere of argument, hard work and scorched victuals with his old friend and hired man Archie Douglas. Both Ian and Archie were known as “characters” on the river. Both were bachelors. In their earlier years, before Ian had acquired the farm of his fathers, they had been brisk fellows, champion choppers in the woods, reckless log cuffers and jam busters on the drives, noted performers of intricate steps at barn dances and plowing frolics and foolish spenders of their wages—white-water boys of the first quality, in short.

But time and the farm had changed them for better and for worse. They never left the farm now except to go to Woodstock on business and to pay the O'Dells two brief visits every month. They worked in rain and shine. They read a few heavy theological volumes and argued over them. They played chess and the bagpipes in a spirit of grim rivalry. They did the cooking week and week about and week and week about they likewise condemned the cooking.

The McAllister hay of this year had been a heavier crop than usual and the price of beef promised to be high next Easter, so Ben O'Dell found his Uncle Ian in an obliging humor. Ian promised to sleep at the O'Dell house every night while his nephew and brother were away from home.

“It be Archie's week for the cookin',” he said, “so I reckon a decent breakfast an' human supper every day for a while won't do me no harm. But what's the matter with yer ma? What's come over her? It ain't like Flora to be scairt. What's she scairt of?”

In justice to his mother Ben had to tell Ian something of the recent strange happenings at the point. He told of little Marion Sherwood's arrival, of her father's flight from French River and the suspicions of the deputy sheriff and of the elaborate destruction of the red pirogue, but he did not mention the thefts. He feared that Ian McAllister's attitude toward a thief, even a hungry and harmless thief, would not be as charitable as his own or his mother's or his Uncle Jim's.

“Mother's more afraid for the little girl than for herself,” he said. “Coming to us like that, all alone in the pirogue, mother wouldn't have anything happen to her for the world. She doesn't want her to be frightened, even. Whatever Richard Sherwood may have done, the poor little girl is innocent.”

“Well, I ain't surprised to hear that Sherwood's shot that feller Balenger,” said Ian. “Sherwood's been headin' for destruction a long time now, what with one foolishness an' another—an' Balenger needed shootin'. But Sherwood hadn't ought to of done it, for all that! That's what comes of bein' wild an', keepin' it up.”

“I don't believe Sherwood did it,” said Ben. “He was my father's friend once and Uncle Jim says he was a good sportsman, so I don't believe he would ever be coward enough to shoot an unarmed man.”

“Ye never can tell,” returned Ian, wagging his head. “Louis Balenger led him a dog's life for years, so I've heard tell, an' I reckon his spirit was jist about broke by the time Louis shot a hole in him an' beat it. He lived quiet enough an' law-abidin' all the years Balenger was away, I guess; an' now it looks like Balenger had come back to French River to start some more divilment an' Sherwood had up an' shot 'im. Sure it was cowardly—but once ye break a man's spirit, no matter how brave he was once, ye make a coward of him. If he didn't do it, why did he run away?”

“That's what I can't figure out, Uncle Ian—but it seems to me a good sportsman might be broken down to some kinds of cowardice and not others. His nerves might get so's they'd fail him without his—well, without his soul turning coward—or even his heart. There's many a good horse that shies at a bit of paper on the road that has the heart to pull on a load till it drops.”

“Mighty deep reasonin',” said Ian McAllister. “That's what comes of schoolin'. We'll chaw it over, me an' Archie; but whatever kind of coward Richard Sherwood may be, I'll look after yer ma an' the little girl while yer away.”

Ben and Uncle Jim set out for French River next morning at an early hour in the canvas canoe. They made ten miles by noon, poling close inshore all the way. They boiled the teakettle, ate the plentiful cold luncheon with which Mrs. O'Dell had supplied them and rested for an hour and a half. Six miles farther up they came to heavy rapids around which they were forced to carry their dunnage and canoe.

“Here's where he left her and the pirogue, I wouldn't wonder,” said McAllister. “Once clear of the rapids, she'd be safe to make the point. But if she was my daughter, I'd take her all the way to wherever she was going, no matter what was chasing me! He ain't the man he was when I first knew him, I guess.”

“Why didn't you stick to him then?” asked Ben. “What did you all drop him for, just because he got mixed up with a bad crowd? That was no way to treat a friend.”

“John kept after him eight or nine years. Once a year, year after year, yer father made the trip to French River and tried to get him to break with the Balengers and offered him land and a house down to the point.”

“But what did you do? You didn't do anything, Uncle Jim.”

“I was leery about visiting French River, in those days. I'd seen just enough of that outfit to guess how easy it would be to get mixed up with them. And Sherwood wasn't encouraging. All he'd do would be to cuss John out for a prig and a busybody. And it's a long way between his clearing and O'Dell's Point.”

“Well, he's hiding for his life now like a wounded snipe; and I guess he wouldn't be if you hadn't been so scared about your own respectability, Uncle Jim.”

McAllister scratched his chin at that but said nothing.

They reached the mouth of French River before sundown and made camp there for the night. They were early astir next morning, breakfasted before the mist was off the water and then launched into the black, deep tide of the tributary stream. The fall of the banks was sheer down to and beneath the water's edge. Poling was out of the question, so the paddles were used. Ben occupied the stern of the canoe, being a few pounds heavier than his uncle and a glutton for work. Wood duck and whistlers flew up and off before their approach. A mink swam across their bows. They passed old cuttings where the stumps of giant pines were hidden by a second growth of tall young spruces and firs.

They paddled for two hours before they marked any sign of present human habitation. They saw a film of smoke then, frail blue against the dark green of the forest. Ben swung into the left bank, which was considerably lower and less abrupt here than farther down, and edged the canoe against a narrow strip of muddy shore. Here was a path, deep-worn and narrow, leading up through the tangled brush; and in the shallow water lay a few rusty tins.

They ascended the path up and over the bank and through a screen of underbrush and water birches into a little clearing. At the back of the clearing stood a small log cabin with an open door and a chimney of sticks and clay. From this chimney ascended the smoke that had attracted them. When they were halfway across the clearing, a short figure appeared in the black door way.

“Injun,” said Uncle Jim over his shoulder.

The man of the clearing came a short way from his threshold and sat down on a convenient chopping block. He had a pipe in his mouth and in his right fist a fork with a piece of pork rind impaled on its prongs. Odors of frying buckwheat cakes and Black Jack tobacco drifted forward and met the visitors. The visitors halted within a few yards of the old Maliseet.

“Good morning, Noel Sabattis,” said McAllister.

“Good day,” returned Noel, regarding the two with expressionless and unwinking eyes.

“I'm afraid your pancakes are burning,” said Ben.

The Maliseet ignored this.

“You police?” he asked.

“Not on yer life!” replied Uncle Jim. “I'm Jim McAllister and this is Ben O'Dell and we're both from O'Dell's Point down on the main river.”

“Come in,” said Noel, getting quickly to his feet and slipping nimbly through the doorway ahead of them.

He was stooping over the griddle on the rusty little stove when the others entered the cabin. He invited them to share his meal, but they explained that they had already breakfasted. So he broke his fast alone with amazing swiftness while they sat on the edge of his bunk and watched him. A dozen or more pancakes generously doused with molasses and three mugs of boiled tea presented no difficulties to old Noel Sabattis. When the last pancake was gone and the mug was empty for the third time, he relit his rank pipe and returned his attention to the visitors. He regarded them searchingly, first McAllister and then young Ben, for a minute or two in silence.

“Li'l girl git to yer place a'right?” he asked.

“Yes, she made it, and she's safe and well,” answered Jim.

“Police git Sherwood yet? You see Sherwood, hey?”

“Not that I've heard of. And we haven't set eyes on him. But Dave Brown and Mel Lunt gave us a couple of calls. They said they'd been up here and seen you.”

“Dat right,” returned Noel. “You t'ink Sherwood shoot dat Balenger feller maybe?”

“I don't!” exclaimed Ben.

“I hope he didn't,” said Jim. “We're his friends.”

“Friends? Dat good,” returned the Maliseet slowly. “Didn't know he had none nowadays 'cept old Noel Sabattis.”