Ben spent hours of the next day searching in the upland woods and the island thickets for Richard Sherwood. The incident of the trap had increased his pity for and his sense of responsibility toward the broken fugitive. Again his efforts were unsuccessful. He found nothing—no ashes of a screened fire, no makeshift shelter, no furtive shape vanishing in the underbrush. He left a message in the woods and down among the willows, repeated on half a dozen of pages torn from his notebook and impaled on twigs. Here is the message:
You are safe and we are your friends. The trap was a mistake. Please come to the house.
He told his mother and Uncle Jim what he had done and they approved of it. He and Uncle Jim drove away next morning; and he and the deputy sheriff caught the two-o’clock train for Quebec.
O’Dell’s Point experienced busier days than usual after Ben O’Dell’s departure on the trail of the marksman from Quebec. The harvest was heavy, and Jim McAllister was the busiest man on the river. By the application of a few plugs of tobacco as advances on wages he procured the services of Sol Bear and Gabe Sacobie, two good Indians. They were good Indians, honest and well-intentioned and hardy, but they were not good farm hands. If McAllister had hired them to take him to the head of the river they would have toiled early and late, bent paddles and poles and backs, made the portages at a jog trot and grinned at fatigue. That would have been an engagement worthy of a Maliseet’s serious consideration and effort. But the harvesting of oats and barley was quite a different matter. Sol and Gabe could see nothing in the laborious pursuit of the dull oats but the wages. Squaws’ work, this. So Uncle Jim had to keep right at their heels and elbows to keep them going.
Jim McAllister kept the sad case of Sherwood in his mind. After the day’s work and the milking and feeding, when the Maliseets were smoking by the woodshed door and his sister and little Marion were sewing and reading in the sitting room, he wandered abroad with a stable lantern. He showed his light in the high pastures, along brush fences and through the fringes of the forest. Sometimes he whistled. Sometimes he shouted the name of the man who had tried to teach him to shoot duck and snipe on the wing half a lifetime ago. He did these things five nights running but without any perceptible result. And no food had been missed since the night the trap had been set and sprung. It looked to Jim as if his brother’s cruel and stupid act had driven Sherwood away, had shattered his last thread of courage, dispelled the last glimmer of his sense of self-preservation and his last ray of hope.