“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.
“No, she won’t—because you won’t ask her that or anything like it,” said young O’Dell.
“There you go again!” interrupted Jim McAllister. “Didn’t I tell you that Ben here’s an O’Dell?”
“Well, what about it? I’m the deputy sheriff of this county and O’Dells are nothing to me when I’m in the performance of my duty.”
“Let me try to explain,” said Ben, crimson with embarrassment and the agitation of his fighting blood. “I respect the laws, Mr. Brown, and I observe them. I was taught to respect them. But I was also taught to respect other laws—kinds that you have nothing to do with—officially. Laws of hospitality—that sort of thing. My father was a good citizen—and a good soldier—and I try to do what I think he would do under the same circumstances. So if you attempt to question that—that little girl—my mother’s guest—about her father—whom you’re hunting for a murderer—I’ll consider it my—unpleasant duty to knock the stuffing out of you!”
“Say, that would take some knocking!” he retorted. “How old are you, young feller?”
“I’m going on eighteen,” replied Ben quietly.