it on the Injun?”

“He didn’t run away.”

“That’s so. Well, we haven’t seen Richard Sherwood around here.”

“Nor anything belonging to him, I suppose?”

Jim McAllister scratched his chin.

“We have seen his daughter,” said Ben O’Dell, with dignity. “She is our guest. She’s in the house now, with my mother. She’s only a little girl—only eleven years old—and I hope you don’t intend to question her about Balenger’s death.”

“That’s what I heard. She’s stopping here, you say, but you ain’t seen her father. That’s queer. How’d she come?”

Ben told of his discovery of the pirogue and the girl against the stakes of the salmon net, but he did not mention the letter which the little voyager had brought to his mother. That letter, whatever it contained, seemed to him entirely too private and purely social a matter to be handed over to the inspection of a deputy sheriff.

“Did she come down all the way from French River alone, a little girl of eleven?” asked Brown. “Is that what ye’re trying to stuff into me?”

“You can’t talk to Ben like that,” interrupted McAllister. “He’s a quiet lad but he’s an O’Dell—and if you’d been born and bred on this river you’d know what I mean. Ask Lunt.”

“That’s right,” said Lunt. “The O’Dells hev always been like that. If they tell anything, it’s true—but I ain’t sayin’ as they always tell all that they know. Now Ben here says the girl was alone when he found her, but he ain’t said that he knows she come all the way from French River alone by herself. How about that, Ben?”

“She told me that her father came part way with her,” said Ben.

“How far?” asked the deputy sheriff.

“She didn’t tell me.”

“Well, maybe she’ll tell me.”

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