Free The Trees by Conrad Richter Page B

door. Through the smoky gloom inside he made out a white man in a leather apron, red and cunning as a fox. That must be the trader, George Roebuck. Then he saw he would have to wait his turn, for a row of Shawanee men were ahead of him to try out this new trader’s prices.
    Holding up his small pack of skins so all could see he had business here, the boy slipped inside. The Shawanees turned their heads. They made like they didn’t see him. Down in Pennsylvania the Indian looked up at a white boy like a dog would. Out here the Indian looked down on you like you were the dog. These Shawanees sat big as king’s men on that log, taking long, slow puffs on their gift tobacco. One with bearclaws around his neck and scars all over his chest stood up with the post’syardstick. He’d point at something and the trader would tell him the price in skins. If the Indian bought it, he paid for it right off out of his roll of furs before he went on to something else. But first he had to heft and feel of it a long time.
    Wyitt wished Sayward, Genny, Achsa and Sulie could see him here. Not that they ever would. Women folks couldn’t walk in a post like a boy and stand with all the riches of the settlements piled up in front of them: bars of bright, new lead laid crosswise on powder kegs; red and green blankets and black ones with a broad white stripe that were the best; bolts of blue strouding and Turkey red goods; new fusils that had hardly been shot off yet; Indian vermilion for the paint bags; wooden buckets of beads, of bells for leggins, of rings for the nose and finger; and a half barrel that kept dripping from its tap in a wooden bowl, making the air sweet with whiskey. But what ran through the boy’s blood like horses were those red tomahawks and shiny scalping knives stuck in a tree corner of the post.
    He had plenty time to look at them today. He stood first on one leg and then the other, going out sometimes for a drink in the run or to put a tree between him and the squaws like a man. When old Bearclaws sat down, another stood up, and when the last sat down, the Shawanees started all over again with their best furs they had saved out for whiskey.Oh, they knew better than to mix their trading and dram-drinking. It was almost dark and the post candles had been lighted when those Indians got done and cleared out.
    Wyitt pushed up.
    “How much fur one a them knives?” he fetched out.
    Maybe he shouldn’t have bothered the trader right now, for wrinkles had to come between George Roebuck’s eyes to hold his mind on the counting of his hairy gold. His lips moved as he laid out skins in piles — bear, beaver, otter, buck, doe, wolf, mink, redcross fox, fisher fox and coon. His quill had to tally these first in his tanned-leather account book. Then he held out a hand for Wyitt’s scanty pack, looked the small skins over, threw them down behind him like they weren’t worth putting in with the others, grunted and reached down a knife. From the trading Wyitt figured he ought to have a couple coon or rat skins left over. But once he got that knife in his fingers, with its round bone handle and blade heavy enough to strike flint with, he wouldn’t hurt the feelings of the trader. Holding tight to that knife, he went out. The squaws had started fires and by their light he saw the trader’s bound boy with two Shawanee boys laying for him outside the door.
    “I kin knock you down and drag you out!” the bound boy bragged at him.
    Wyitt stiffened.
    “You kain’t while I got this knife.”
    “Lemme see it!”
    Wyitt put it behind him. His young face had turned hard and cruel. His freckles looked like rusty iron. Oh, he wasn’t big as this bound boy but he’d go on his muscle before he’d let him touch his knife. The pair stood almost against each other, one scowling down and one scowling up, neither one giving way any more than two young bucks meeting in the path. The Shawanee boys watched with their black eyes glittering. They