“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.