truth to tell," he went on, drawing on his thoughts of a few minutes before, "I didn't leave the Gillen farm til they stopped treating me like I was a man and worked me like a sim in the fields.
That's purely not right, sirs, making a man into a sim, and if slavery lets one man do that to an other, why, it's not right either. That's all."
He sat as abruptly as he had risen. Douglas leaned over find patted him on the back, murmuring, "Out to steal my bib? You just might do it."
"Huh," Jeremiah said, but the praise warmed him.
The arguments went on; Hayes was not one to leave a ase so long as he had breath to talk. But he and Douglas here hammering away at smaller points now, thrashing around the edges of things. Douglas got in only one shot he thought telling, a reminder of the historic nature of the case
"That's for Kemble's sake," he told Jeremiah during a recess.
"Letting him think people will remember his name forever for the sake of what he does here can't hurt."
Jeremiah thought about that, and contrasted it to Caleb Gillen's picture of the law as a vast impersonal force poised over the heads of miscreants. He preferred Douglas's way of hoking at things. People were easier to deal with than vast impersonal forces.
Gillen walked down Granby Pike toward the Benjamin and Levi Bank of Portsmouth. Money jingled in his pocket. Even if the Conscript Fathers of Virginia decided to set up a clientage system like the one Alfred Douglas had outlined the year before, by now he had enough money to buy himself out of any further service to the family that had once owned him.
Hayes was still appealing his case, of course, sending up writ after writ based on Judge Scott's narrow interpretation of the law.
But Judge Hardesty had been as narrowly for Jeremiah as Scott was against him, and Judge Kemble's ringing condemnation of human slavery would be hard to overturn. Douglas had been dead right about him, Jeremiah thought, he must have decided the eyes of history were on him.
A sim struggling along with a very fat knapsack bumped into Jeremiah.
"Watch where you're going, you brainless flathead," he snapped.
The sim cringed. It managed to get one hand free of its burden for a moment to sign, Sorry. Then it staggered on.
Jeremiah felt briefly ashamed. After all, were it not for sims, blacks would have been at the bottom of things, the target of everyone's spleen.
He almost went after the subhuman to apologize, but the sim would never have understood. And that was exactly the point.
He kept on toward the bank.
Trapping Run
The range where bands of wild sims could continue to live their lives much as they had before Europeans came to North America continued to shrink as human settlements pushed westward. Few bands remained entirely untouched by human influence. Sign-talk, for example, spread from band to band, even in areas where no people had ever been seen, because it was a conspicuously better means of communication than the subhumans' native assortment of noises and gestures.
Some trappers and explorers were friendly with the wild sims through whose lands they passed. Others, manifestly, were not. Bands of sims, naturally, often responded in kind, being well-disposed toward humans if the first person they met had been friendly to them, and hostile even to those who would not have harmed them if their first experience with humans had been a bad one. In this as in so much else, sims revealed how closely they resembled people.
In colonial days, and in the early years of the Federatdedf CminOre than their shave T attitude not Wdthmuphasize the
elStsedn however in the In tjthewas a trapper WhO beGan what ca 2 the sims i FrOm The Story of the Fedetat forest wed into the l I w 'II k mt tr head, surprised he hladd 5Ptoakleked even to himself and when don’t understand English.
will grasp hit The Six had Law i. by_ ! f , S chopped it down with a few hard swings. Then it checked If the edge of the hatchet head with its thumb. It hooted $ again. Still sharp, no chips, it signed. Good.
In spite of its metal knife, it was still used to the chipped stones sims made for themselves.
Good, Henry Quick agreed. He had paid fifty sesters for the hatchet back in Cairo; the marten fur would be worth easily twenty times as much. Some people in the cities of the Federated Commonwealths called that robbery. Quick did not see it that way.
Back on the other side of the mountains, hatchets were easy to come by, marten furs much less so. The situation was reversed here. Accounts l balanced.
Too, back in the cities of the Commonwealths, Quick [ would have had to put up with the stink of coal smoke, railroad noise, and the endless presence of people. He had little use for pointless chatter.
Maybe that was one reason he got on well with sims: they lacked the brains to talk when they did not have something to say. Some trappers, Quick knew, treated sims like wolves or foxes or any other vermin, and hunted them savagely. Sims robbed traps, no doubt of that. They were hungry al the time, and meat already caught was easy meat. Quick was sure the sim in the clearing with him had eaten the marten's carcass as soon as the pelt was off it.
In a way, Quick fol owed the reasoning of the trappers ' who went after sims. Because of their hands and wits, sims made devilish thieves. But those same hands and wits made them dangerous enemies.
By the nature of things, trappers traveled alone or in small groups.
The ones who came down hardest on sims often never returned.
Quick had always felt that making them into al ies worked better.
His initial expense was greater because of the trade goods he bought before every journey, but he thought he got more furs by enlisting the sims' aid than by harassing them. He found a trap robbed every now and again, yes, but more often were cases like this one, sims doing his hunting for him.
The subhuman flourished the hatchet again, making the flair sigh.
Good, it signed, and left the clearing with no more farewell than that.
Henry Quick was not offended; he had scant use for ceremony himself.
He stretched the skin, fur side in, on a piece of wood, and set it aside to dry. He did not have many marten pelts back at his base camp, which made him doubly glad for this one.
He also thought he would have to be a lot hungrier than he was, to want to eat marten meat.
He walked the trap line to check the snares he had set within a couple of miles of the clearing. Blazes he had cut on trees at eye level guided him from one trap to the next. As far
as he knew, sims had not figured out what blazes were for. He had several sets of traps within the territory this band wandered, each grouped around a clearing. He tried to make a complete circuit every couple of weeks or so, to make sure none of the beasts he caught decomposed enough to harm their pelts.
His nose guided him to the first trap. He shook his head in annoyance.
The trap must have taken a victim almost as soon as he reset it the last time through. He was doubly annoyed when
he found the metal jaws holding only a striped ground squirrel, whose skin would have been worthless even if fresh. Doubly disgusted, he threw the little corpse away, set the trap again, stuck on a fresh suet bait, and went on to the next one.
Something, probably a bird but maybe a sim, had stolen the bait from that trap without springing it. Quick sighed and replaced it. The bait on the trap after that was stil intact.
Quick sighed again; he'd have to think about moving it.
When he neared the next trap, he heard a wild, desperate thrashing. He drew his pistol and sidled forward, soft leather boots sliding soundlessly over dirt and grass, leaves and twigs. Catching a sim in the act of robbing a trap would be tricky; finding one caught in a trap might be worse, for that could turn the whole band against him.