of the Sherwoods of French River.

Mr. Richard Sherwood first appeared at O’Dell’s Point twenty-six years ago when James McAllister was only twenty years of age. He was direct from England, by way of the big town sixty miles downriver. He arrived with three loaded canoes and six Maliseet canoemen from the reservation near Kingstown and jumped knee-deep into the water before the canoes could make the shore and set up a shout that started the echoes on the far side of the river.

“Jack O’Dell. Guncotton Jack! Tally-ho! Steady the Buffs!”

The Maliseets wondered; the mowers on island and mainland ceased their labors to give ear; and John O’Dell, in the orchard, hooked his scythe into the crotch of an apple tree and started for the beach at top speed with Jim McAllister close at his heels. O’Dell went down the bank in two jumps. The stranger saw him and splashed ashore. They met halfway between the willows and the water and shook hands two-handed. They were certainly glad to see each other.

That was how Richard Sherwood came to O’Dell’s Point. He was a fine-looking young man, red and brown, with a swagger in his shoulders and a laugh in his dark eyes. But all the world was young then. Even Captain John O’Dell was only twenty-six.

Sherwood had been a lieutenant in O’Dell’s company of the second battalion of the Buffs. The two young men had served together in a hill war in India; and Sherwood had been present when O’Dell, refusing to accept another volunteer after three had been shot down, had advanced with a cigarette between his lips and lighted the fuse of the charge of guncotton which the first volunteer had placed under the gate of the fort. He had lighted the fuse with the coal of his cigarette, while the entire garrison shot down at him and his men shot up at the garrison and then had turned and walked downhill to the nearest cover with blood flowing down his neck, the top gone from his helmet, the guard of his sheathed sword smashed on his hip and a slug of lead in the calf of his right leg—still smoking the cigarette.

John O’Dell had resigned his commission soon after the death of his father and returned home to Canada and his widowed mother and the wide gray house at O’Dell’s Point. That had been just two years before Richard Sherwood’s arrival on the river.

Sherwood lived with the O’Dells until December. He was a live wire. He worked on the farm, swam in the river, shot duck and partridge and snipe, hunted moose 

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