Old Noel Sabattis talked more like a Frenchman than the kind of Indian you read about. He wasn't reticent. Perhaps he had a thin strain of French blood in him, from away back, long ago forgotten. He called himself pure Maliseet. His vocabulary was limited but he made it cover the ground. Sometimes he grunted in the approved Indian manner but he could say as much with a grunt as most men can with six words. His heart was in it; and with grunts and blinks of the eye and his limited vocabulary he told Ben O'Dell and Jim McAllister all that he knew about poor Sherwood.
Noel was a lonely man. He had been a widower for close upon thirty years. His children had grown up and gone to the settlements a lifetime ago. But he had refused to go to any settlement. He had left his old trapping and hunting grounds on the Tobigue and come onto French River about ten years ago. He found Sherwood and Julie and their baby on the river in the big log house that had been Louis Balenger's. They were the only regular settlers on the stream but there was a big camp belonging to a fishing club five miles farther up.
Julie Sherwood was a fine little woman though she was Balenger's daughter, and prettier than you had any right to expect to see anywhere. Sherwood was quite a man when she was close to him; but even then Noel thought that he wasn't all he might have been. He had a weak eye—honest enough, but weak; and whenever his wife was out of his sight he was like a scared buck, ready to jump at a shadow. But he was kind and generous and Noel liked him. Julie was generous and friendly, too. They offered Noel as much room as he needed in their house and a place at their table; but Noel was an independent fellow and said that he'd have a roof of his own. He set to work at chopping out a clearing within a few hundred yards of Sherwood's clearing, and Sherwood helped him.
It wasn't long before Noel Sabattis knew a great deal about Dick Sherwood and, naturally, about the Balengers. Both the man and the woman talked to him as if they trusted him; but she was the more confiding of the two. It was she who told of Sherwood's treatment at the hands of her father and her older sister. She was bitter against both her father and her sister, but she made the bitterest accusations when her husband was not within earshot, for they would have humiliated him. And he was already too humble and she was giving all her thought and love to awakening his old self-respect in his heart.
She told Noel that her father had impoverished Sherwood years ago, when she was a child of ten or eleven, by cheating at cards, and then had tricked him into his debt and his power by further cheating—and all under the guise of friendship and good-fellowship. Her mother had told her so in a deathbed confession. Then her father had tried to make a rogue of Sherwood. He had succeeded temporarily, but with such difficulty and by means of such cruel efforts that he had made a coward of him. Yes, a coward—and that was worse than all the rest, it had seemed to Julie. She told the Maliseet that he, Richard Sherwood, who had been a soldier, had no courage now except what he got from her.
Noel used to advise them to leave French River. He put it strong, in spite of the fact that he would have been desolate if they had gone. Julie said they were planning to go to the settlements as soon as the baby was big enough to travel and Sherwood agreed with her. Noel suggested that Louis Balenger might come back and pump two more bullets into Sherwood. At that the big, broken Englishman paled under his tan but the woman didn't flinch. She said that her father would never return but that she was not afraid of him anyway.
Noel and the Sherwoods lived peacefully in their adjoining clearings year after year. Noel and Sherwood trapped fur together; but Sherwood never went very far afield. His mind and nerves went “jumpy” when ever he got mere than a few miles away from his wife and child. As the years passed he seemed normal enough when with them, more nearly a sound man each year; but once out of sight of them his eyes showed fear.