his uncle frying pancakes in a fever of distracted effort, spilling batter, scorching cakes and perspiring.

“Where are they?” he asked.

Uncle Jim motioned toward an inner door with the long knife with which he was working so hard and accomplishing so little. Ben took the knife away from him, cleared the griddle of smoking ruins and scraped it clean.

“You didn’t grease it,” he said. “I’ll handle the pork and do the turning and you handle the batter.”

This arrangement worked satisfactorily.

“Where’d you find her, Ben?” whispered McAllister.

“In a big pirogue drifted against the stakes of our net,” replied the youth. “She was asleep when I first glimpsed her and I thought it was somebody dead. It gave me a start, I can tell you.”

“It sure would. Well, I reckon she’s as queer a fish as was ever taken in a salmon net on this river.”

“It was a queer place to find her, all right. Who’s Richard Sherwood, Uncle Jim? Do you know him? How did mother come to guess who she was?”

“I used to know him. All of us did for a few years, a long time ago. He was quality, the same as your pa—but he wasn’t steady like your pa.”

“Quality? You mean he was a gentleman?”

“That’s what he’d ought to been, anyhow—but I reckon the woods up French River, and one thing and another, were too much for his gentility. Ssh! Here they come!”

Mrs. O’Dell and little Marion Sherwood entered the kitchen hand in hand. The eyes of both wore a suggestion of recent tears and hasty bathing with cold water, but both were smiling, though the little girl’s smile was tremulous and uncertain.

“Jim, this is Dick Sherwood’s daughter,” said the woman. “You and Dick were great friends in the old days, weren’t you?”

“We sure was,” returned McAllister awkwardly but cordially. “He was as smart a man in the water as ever I saw. Could dive and swim like an otter. And a master hand with a gun! He could shoot birds a-flying easier’n I could hit ’em on the ground. John was a good shot, too, but he wasn’t a match for your pa, little girl. I hope he keeps in good health.”

“Yes, thank you,” whispered Marion.

 Prev. P 5/90 next