The Light in the Forest Read Online Free Page B

Indians looking pitiful and slavish among their enemies.
    But it was when they had left Fort Pitt and crossed the eastern mountains that the full weight of his exile fell on him. Never along the Tuscarawas had he seen such tremendous mounds of earth and rock heaped to the sky and running farther than the eye could see. Once behind him, they were like unscalable stockades separating him from his people. And now he saw he had reached a point he had often heard about, the sad, incredible region where the Indian forest had been cut down by the white destroyers and no place left for the Indian game to live. Here the desolate face of the earth had been exposed to dead brown weeds and stubble, lorded over by the lodges of the white people and the fat storehouses of their riches. Fort Pitt had been ugly, but it had still been Indian country. This now, he knew, was the barbarous homeland of his white enemies.
    He could feel them all around him. His moccasins tramped no longer soft mossy forest trails but a hard-rutted roadway. Curious wooden barriers ran alongside in a regular crooked fashion with spreading wooden horns at each angle. He was told they were meant to keep the white man’scattle from running free. The cattle stood tame and stolid as the soldiers passed, but the white people came running from their lodges to line the road. From the noise they made you might have thought the white army came from a great battle with loot and scalps instead of only children captives and without a shot having been fired.
    Every hour the forest receded and the lodges of the whites grew more numerous. Late that afternoon they encamped near a white man’s village. How could human beings, he wondered, live in such confinement! Here the whites had shut themselves up in prisons of gray stone and of red stone called brick, while the larger log houses had been covered over with smooth painted boards to give them the glittering ostentation and falseness so dear to the whites. Evidently their coming had been expected, for many people awaited them. Herds of saddled horses stood around. Men and women must have come a long way. Small crowds tried to storm the captives as soon as they arrived, but the soldiers held them off.
    That evening the red-headed guard spoke to True Son in Delaware.
    “Well, thank the Almighty I won’t have to wetnurseyou much more. Your father’s taking you over in the morning.”
    The boy gave no answer but the realization of who these people were swept over him. They were the captives’ future masters, who would claim them and drag them off to a life of subjection in their own lodges. Among this company staring at him now was likely the one who pretended to be his own father.
    The sun rose red and cold next morning. Through a frosty mist they were herded to the middle of the town where for a blocklike space no houses had been built, for what reason the boy did not know. It was early, but already the white people had gathered around fires trying to keep warm. Hardly had the captives arrived before they were stormed, taken by the hand, their faces sharply looked into, their scanty dress lifted apart for birthmarks, all the while their ears bombarded with questions that True Son could only in part understand. Then the Colonel and his staff put an end to it. They showed they had learned at least one thing from the Indians. They announced there would be no more confusion. All would be conducted according to rule and order.
    Nothing of the scene that followed was missed by True Son—the swarming whites in cloaks and greatcoats, their heads scarved and hatted, and in their midst the sacrificial cluster of captives, mostly young, bareheaded, in simple Indian dress, with parts of their bodies exposed to the early winter wind. One unwilling young captive after another was brought forward, what was known about him or her announced, then a hearing given those who claimed relationship. Several times the crowd gave way to emotion, wiping