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 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.