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Hannah say that what John liked least about his baby brother was that he lived. “That John Hale, he got himself accustomed to being mostly prized in this house simply for surviving. Not having to do nothing else to be special. Then little Quentin came along and he survived too, and John Hale, he didn’t like that.”
    Quent guessed that was true, but he didn’t worry too much about it. Mostly John ignored him. The younger boy was something to be put up with, like the flies of spring and the mosquitoes of summer and the mice that came indoors when it got cold. Quent tried to ignore John in his turn, but it wasn’t always possible.
    Do Good was on the northern rim of Shadowbrook’s land, a couple of hours upriver from the big house. The people who lived there called themselves Friends; everyone else called them Quakers, because, it was said, they quaked before the Lord. That was maybe why they were known to be the most straight-dealing people in the colonies. Once the Quakers said it would be so—they refused to take an oath because it implied they were not always telling the truth—it was so.
    Ephraim Hale allowed the Quakers to settle on his land for precisely that reason. They ran his trading post and did all Shadowbrook’s business with the local Indians. The Kahniankehaka brought furs to Do Good to exchange for metal tools, woven cloth, and of course ale and spirits. Periodically the Quakers took the pelts of beaver, otter, bear, and seal to New York City and sold them. Ephraim had no part in the business side of the Do Good trading post, but he never for a moment doubted that he was getting the two-fifths part of the proceeds to which he was entitled in their agreement.
    That February Ephraim sent his eldest son to Do Good to collect what Shadowbrook was owed. “Take the young ones with you.”
    John had yet to say Cormac Shea’s name aloud. “Both of them?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I said so.”
    John looked quickly upstairs toward the adjoining bedrooms occupied by his mother and his father, then in the direction of the little room near the kitchen where the Potawatomi whore spent most of her time. “Maybe Mother would care for an outing,” he said, looking straight at his father. “Shall I ask her?”
    Ephraim didn’t flinch from his eldest son’s glance. “Your mother is staying here. And if you want to be allowed to do the same, you’d best do as I say.”
    John took Quent and Cormac with him to Do Good.
    The trading post was built of split logs; it was the biggest building in the settlement and the first built. The houses and the pair of barns at either end of the single village road were made of planked wood from Shadowbrook’s sawmill. Thebarn at the opposite end from the trading post was the Friends’ meeting house and had been given a coat of whitewash. That made it the fanciest thing in the place, except maybe for the sign that said DO GOOD TRADING POST in black letters on a white board.
    Inside the trading post Esther Snowberry stood at a long wooden counter. Behind her the wall was lined with shelves containing bolts of homespun, rows of tin mugs and crockery bowls, and heavy metal frying pans called spiders with three short legs so they could stand beside the hearth. One entire shelf held brown crockery jugs filled with the rum Moses Frankel distilled from the boat-loads of Caribbean sugar that arrived at Shadowbrook’s downriver wharf. After the sugar was offloaded the ships took on the plantation’s grain and vegetables and barrels of salted pork and venison. Without those foodstuffs the Barbadian planters and their slaves would starve, since every inch of their soil was given over to cane, the king of all cash crops.
    On the counter beside Esther was a pile of furs, a mix of thick brown beaver pelts and a few gray-black sealskins. She had obviously been inspecting them, but she looked up from the task the moment the Hale brothers and Cormac Shea arrived.