“Well, let’s go to bed, mother. Who’s afraid of a burglar who steals books?”
CHAPTER IV
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!”