OBSTRUCTING THE LAW
Mrs. O’Dell ceased to worry about the mysterious thefts and the red
setter’s 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 doorway.
“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.
[Illustration: “SAT DOWN ON A CONVENIENT CHOPPING BLOCK.”]
“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.”