MAN DREW ALONGSIDE AND PEERED AT BEN.”

“Hold hard there!” cried Hood. “What pranks be ye up to now?”

“Pranks? What are you talking about?” returned the youth.

The old man drew alongside and peered at Ben, shading his eyes with a hand against the glare of the fire.

“Oh, it’s yerself!” he exclaimed. “Well, what d’ye know about this here? What be the joke an’ who be the joker?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” replied Ben, turning again to contemplate the drifting fire.

The mass of wood had settled considerably by this time and was now a mound of hot crimson and orange with low flames running over it. The gunnels of the pirogue were burning swiftly, edging the long mass of glowing embers with a hedge of livelier flame. The big pirogue hissed from end to end and was girdled by misty puffs of steam.

“Looks to me like a pirogue,” said old Tim Hood. “A big one, like the ones we uster make afore all the big pine was cut off hereabouts.”

Ben was about to tell what he knew but he checked himself. Pride and perhaps something else prompted him to keep quiet. Why should he admit to this old ferryman that some one on the river had dared to take a pirogue from the O’Dell front? Very likely it would amuse Hood to believe that the influence of this distinguished family for honesty and order was waning, for the ferryman was the only person within ten miles of O’Dell’s Point who had ever openly denied the virtue of the things for which the O’Dells of the Point had stood for more than a hundred years. During Captain John’s term of occupation, and even in the days of Ben’s grandfather, Tim Hood had openly derided the elegant condescension of the O’Dell manners and the purity of the O’Dell speech and made light of learning, military rank and romantic traditions. So Ben did not tell the old man that the pirogue had been set adrift from O’Dell’s Point.

“I saw it from my bedroom window and couldn’t make out what it was,” he said.

“Same here,” replied Hood. “An’ whatever it was, it won’t be even that much longer.”

He swung the sturgeon boat around and paddled away into the gloom.

Ben also deserted the fated pirogue which was now 

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