The Corn Raid by James Lincoln Collier

Author:James Lincoln Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: 2013-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Your father wouldn’t kill you. Ask him.”

“Father won’t tell me nothing about corn.”

I saw that Laydon figured Weetoppin was just being stubborn. “Look, Weetoppin,” he said, “I know it’s a risk for you. It’s worth a good knife to me.”

Weetoppin turned his head to look out the window at the woods and the sky. I knew him well enough: he was wishing he’d never killed that boy. He was wishing he was back home in his village with his father, his cousins and aunts, and the kids he’d grown up with and couldn’t talk to anymore. I knew clear as I knew my own name that he’d give anything to put things back to where they were before. But he couldn’t do that. I felt mighty sad for him. Much as I’d miss having him for a friend, I wished he could go home to his village too. There wasn’t anything I could do about that either.

“A good, long metal knife with bone handle,” he said. He’d decided something, but I didn’t know what.

“Good,” Laydon said, clapping Weetoppin on the shoulder. “Now we got to work it out about getting you up there. I’ll let you know in a couple of days.”

Weetoppin didn’t say anything. He just took another look beyond the tobacco field to where his village was, somewhere up the James River.

I wanted to know what Weetoppin was planning to do. I knew for certain that he wasn’t going to tell Laydon where that corn was hid, even if he could find out—which I wasn’t sure he could. He was going to get a good knife out of it anyway. But I decided to let it go for a while. It wasn’t any of my business, when you got down to it. If Weetoppin wanted to tell me, he would.

Two days later, Laydon sent Weetoppin over to Henry Spofford’s place with a message that he’d written on a piece of paper. I started to go out to the tobacco field, but Laydon called me back. “Richard, I’ve been talking to some of the other men. They want you to go along with Weetoppin to the Weyanock village.”

I was plenty surprised. “What for? I can’t speak Algonquian, except about six words.” I could speak a little more than that, for I’d learned some from Weetoppin, but not much.

“They don’t trust Weetoppin. He might just hide out in the woods for a couple of days and then tell us that the Weyanocks didn’t have any corn left—that they’d traded it off to another tribe or something. They want you to go along and see for yourself where the corn is hidden.”

It was the most awful pinch to put me in. On one side of it, I was English and bound to be loyal to my own people, just like Weetoppin was to his. You could say all you wanted about the English coming to Virginia, where they weren’t wanted, and pushing the Indians back so they’d have land for farms and such.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.