The Red Pirogue: A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian Wilds

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

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.