and made a number of trips upstream in search of land to buy and settle on. He wanted thousands of acres. He had big but somewhat confused ideas of what he wanted. He liked the life. It was brisk and wild. He confided to young Jim McAllister that he wouldn’t object to its being even brisker and wilder than he found it in the vicinity of O’Dell’s Point. The O’Dells, he said, were just a trifle too conscious of their duty toward, and superiority to, the lesser people of the river.

Jim McAllister admired Sherwood vastly in those days and was with him on the river and in the woods as often as possible. The McAllisters lived in the next house above the point. The family consisted then of Ian and Jim and Agnes and Flora and their parents and a grandfather.

They were not like the O’Dells exactly, those McAllisters, but they were just as good in their own way. Their habitation was less than the O’Dell house by four bedrooms, a gun room, a library and a drawing-room with two fireplaces; and their farm was of one hundred and sixty acres against the square mile of mainland and forty-acre island of the O’Dells. And yet the two families were loyal friends of long standing. The first McAllister to settle on the river one hundred and ten years ago had been a sergeant in the regiment of which the first O’Dell had been the commanding officer.

Jim McAllister took Mr. Richard Sherwood upriver in December, twenty-six years ago, to introduce him to some of the mysteries of trapping fur. Sherwood was restless and traveled fast. After a time they struck French River at a point about ten miles from its mouth and within a few hundred yards of the log house of Louis Balenger. Balenger had Iroquois blood in his veins and was from the big northern province of Quebec. He had come to French River with his family five or six years before, traveling light and fast. When Jim McAllister saw where he was he urged Sherwood to keep right on, for Balenger had the reputation of being a dangerous man.

But Louis sighted them and hailed them, ran to meet them and had them within the log walls of his house as quick as winking. And there was rum on the table and the fire on the hearth burned cheerily and Mrs. Balenger said that dinner would be ready in half an hour. The dinner was plentiful and well cooked, the eyes of the Balenger girls were big and black and bright and the conversation of Louis was pure entertainment though somewhat mixed in language.

That was the beginning of Richard Sherwood’s fall from grace in the eyes of the O’Dells and McAllisters 

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