interesting to me! and I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that you were wrong when you said the woods had been too much for his gentility, Uncle Jim.”

“Neither would I, myself. But how d’ye figger it, Ben?”

“Well, the little girl has good manners.”

“She sure has! I never saw a little girl with better manners. I’m hoping her pa hasn’t done something they can jail him for—or if he has, that they can’t catch ’im. I’m all for keeping the laws—even the game laws—but maybe if I’d lived on French River along with Louis Balenger instead of at O’Dell’s Point alongside O’Dells all my life, I’d be busy this minute keeping a jump ahead of the wardens instead of hilling potatoes. You never can tell. There’s more to shootin’ a moose in close season nor the twitch of the finger. There’s many an outlaw running the woods who would have been an honest farmer like yer Uncle Jim if only he’d been born a McAllister and been bred alongside the O’Dells.”

“I’ve been thinking that myself,” returned Ben gravely. “Environment, that’s it! The influence of environment.”

“It sure sounds right to me, all right,” said McAllister. “We’ll call it that, anyhow; and we won’t forget that Dick Sherwood taught his little girl good manners and how to read.”

The thought of getting away from the duties of the farm for a few days was a pleasant one to both the honest farmer and his big nephew. Jim McAllister was not an enthusiastic agriculturalist. He loved the country and he didn’t object to an occasional bout of strenuous toil; but the unadventurous round of milking and weeding and hoeing day after day bored him extremely even now in his forty-sixth year. But for the mild excitement of the salmon net in the river and his love for his widowed sister and his nephew and his respect for the memory of the late Captain John O’Dell he would long ago have turned his back on the implements of husbandry and taken to the woods.

Young Ben, on the other hand, was keen about farm work. He preferred it to school work. He was young enough to find excitement where none was perceptible to his uncle. He loved all growing things, but he loved cattle more than crops, horses more than cows. The practical side of farm life was dear to him and he took pleasure in the duties which seemed humdrum to his uncle; but the side issues, the sporting features, were even dearer. He loved the river better than the meadow and he saw eye to eye with McAllister in the matter of the salmon net. A 

 Prev. P 14/90 next