The Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jary.
    “Bosh and moonshine!” she flared out at him. “Injuns was a scalpin’ and massacreein’ and torturin’ and burnin’ up their own brothers long before they ever heerd of a white person. They brag their own selves how they killed off all the Injuns that used to live around here. Did you ever hear of an Injun payin’ even a fi’penny bit for land like the whites?”
    Worth would say nothing more. There was no use trying to get the best of Jary. You might as well try to head off a gadd or talk back to a whaup.His eyes retreated ominously into his beard till you couldn’t see much more than the whites. In the morning he took his gun and Sarge and did not come back that night. Next day it started a cold rain.
    On toward dusk they thought they heard Worth coming and Sulie ran to open the door. A Delaware stood there with the firelight licking on his wet face and on the silver wheels in his ears that were stretched down halfways to his shoulders. He was ugly as sin, bedraggled in his matchcoat as a wet turkey hen, but in he tramped big as some redcoat major. The water ran off him in little streams and when he got to the fire, he shook himself like a dog. The drops rained all over. He sat himself down by the warm hearth to dry. You might have reckoned this was his own cabin, and his squaw and young ones could be mortal glad to see him home again.
    Jary had stared after him with a tight-mouthed, angry look. Now she turned to Sayward.
    “If I had my way,” her eyes said, “I’d a seed him in the river first. But what’s a body to do — turn him out in the rain?”
    Sayward was sitting by the trencher when he came. Now she went on about her business, working a doeskin with her hands. They had taken the hair off with lye from fire ashes and tanned it with oak bark liquor in a log trough. Once the hide wasworked soft, Jary would lay it on the trencher and cut it out with the cabin knife, and Genny’s nimble fingers would sew up a shirt for Wyitt. He had some squirrel ready that he wanted it trimmed with. Every morning he made the rounds of his log and sapling snares, hoping for a mink or otter skin Worth could trade for buttons when he went to some post. Oh, with black fur trimmings and horn or pewter buttons, Wyitt was going to be a dandy and no mistake.
    When their caller got too hot in front, he turned his side to the fire and Sayward had a good look at him. She had never seen this one before. His nose was big as a red Conestoga potato. It even had eyes like a potato. Put that nose in a dark place like a cellar, and it looked like it would grow white sprouts. But nobody could sit bigger at the hearth.
    Sayward had nothing for the way squaws gave in to their men, waiting on them hand and foot, giving them the notion they were lords of creation. About all these men would turn a finger to was war and hunt. Let them kill themselves a fat deer, would they fetch it in? Not them. They’d hang it up on the nearest tree where the wolves couldn’t get it and march back to camp with nothing but their fusils over their shoulders: No, their squaws could come out and skin it and fetch it in.
    For all she knew, this one here had plenty meat hanging out in the woods right now. It looked likeit, for mighty little of theirs did he eat that evening, though she had roasted it to a turn. Worth hadn’t come home and he wasn’t likely to any more tonight, for when Sayward went out, the rain on the door log had turned to ice. It was a black world but tomorrow, she reckoned, would be a white one. And then they would have a new job getting rid of their company, for if there was one thing an Indian hated worse than getting out in the rain, it was getting out in the snow.
    “You kin sleep up in the loft tonight,” Sayward told Genny. “I’ll lay with Mam.”
    Genny had plenty to say to that. She wouldn’t have a savage who never washed from one summer to the next sleeping on her and Sayward’s bed. But Sayward shooed her up the