Longarm and the Whiskey Woman (9 page)

Everyone laughed at the table except Longarm. "Ain't that a bit hard on the dog?"

Salem shook his head. He said, "Nah, we've got a pillow stuffed with goose feathers laying right there beside the pan, so when he falls over, he don't hurt himself."

Longarm nodded. "I see. That's damned thoughtful of YOU."

About then, the woman came in from the kitchen and set a plate of food in front of Longarm and Frank Carson. There was what appeared to be smoked ham and gravy and some mashed potatoes and some kind of garden peas. There was a big hunk of corn bread on each plate.

Frank Carson said, "Bathsheba, you didn't have to go to this much trouble."

Longarm said, "Mrs. Colton, I am much obliged. I was as hungry as a hog. Mr. Carson can give me his part if he don't want it."

Carson said, "I never said that! I was just being polite."

Longarm nodded at the woman. "I am much obliged, Mrs. Colton. This here ham looks mighty good."

Salem Colton said, "Y'all go on and eat and then we'll talk after a minute. I'll be right interested to hear how come Mr. Long wants to go into the whiskey business."

Longarm said, "Well, for the simple reason that the timber business has about played out."

Salem Colton narrowed his eyes. "Timber? Ain't no timber in Arizona from what I've heard. It's mostly desert."

Longarm began cutting his ham. He said, "Yeah, it's desert now, but it didn't use to be before I started into the timber business."

That brought a pretty good laugh and seemed to settle the mood in the room. Even the two young men had stopped giving him hard looks.

The three men were rough but cleanly dressed. Only the man in the middle, the older one, was bearded. The other two supported drooping mustaches. They didn't look especially mean, or inbred, or especially suspicious. Longarm reckoned that they led a lonely, hard life making whiskey and selling it. He doubted that they or their womenfolk got into town much. Even though the three men, whom Longarm guessed ranged in age from mid-twenties to late forties, didn't appear all that rough or tough, he expected that neither they nor any of their clan would be people to get careless with. When they had finished their meal, he and Carson, almost together, pushed their plates away. In an instant, Bathsheba appeared from nowhere to collect their knives and forks and plates. She headed for the kitchen, leaving the table and the conversation to the men.

Salem Colton hunched forward a little, putting his big hands and forearms on the table. He said to Longarm, "Now, what's this about you wanting to buy whiskey? How much whiskey are you wanting to buy?"

"Neighbor, I ain't been in this part of the country more than two or three days, and I'm just kind of getting my feet wet right now. I figure if you're willing to sell it and I can get it to a railroad someplace without either drowning or falling off one of these damned mountains here, that I'd maybe like to take about two thousand gallons, depending on the price."

Salem gave him a long look and then turned his head to spit tobacco. He said, turning back to Longarm, "Well, that's about the least we'll sell. Gonna cost you about a dollar and a quarter a gallon, but the selling of it ain't up to me."

Longarm glanced around at Frank Carson. The price that Salem Colton had just quoted was almost double the amount Carson had said he had been paying. Longarm made no sign. He had no intentions of buying any whiskey, but he felt to be taken seriously, he ought to put up a show of bargaining. He shook his head and said, "That sounds mighty dear to me. That sounds like about twenty-five hundred dollars' worth of green whiskey to me. I'll have to do all sorts of doctoring up and getting it in bottles before I could ever make a profit. Gonna be quite a few costs to a middleman on this project."

Salem shook his head. "Well, to begin with, we've got plenty of buyers for our whiskey, and then secondly, it ain't up to me. It's up to Asa. He might not be willing to sell you a drop, much less two thousand gallons."

Longarm said, "Who's Asa?"

Salem shrugged. "Well, I reckon you might have to call him the boss. He's my uncle, but since Joshua died, who was my daddy and several other boys' daddy, Asa kind of runs the show. He's the main man, you might say."

Longarm said, "And where is he?"

Salem nodded his head at Frank Carson. He said, "He knows. If he wants to see you buying any whiskey, he'll take you there or he'll point you there. I wouldn't recommend, however, you go by yourself. There's some pretty ticklish country between here and there, and I don't mean that you might fall off into a valley somewhere."

Longarm gave him a thin smile. "You mean I might fall off with a bullet through my chest?"

"That's about the size of it."

"Well, how far is it?"

Salem stretched. He said, "Oh, it ain't all that far in miles--maybe six or seven. I ain't never taken a count of it. But there's some real unfriendly folks you don't want to be passing without some word going on ahead that you're all right. See, what we're doing ain't exactly approved by some folks, the law and whatnot, though I'm sure by now Mr. Carson has told you what our cousin Morton Colton is good for. We call him the wagon-wheel grease. Keeps our wheels turning, if you take my meaning."

Longarm nodded. He said, "Oh, I take your meaning. But what about getting the whiskey out of here?"

Salem said, "I imagine Mr. Carson's already told you how we get the whiskey out of here."

Longarm glanced at Frank Carson. He said; "You'd be surprised how close-mouthed this friend of mine is here. Even though he saved my life and got me out of a tight fix, he still ain't told me a whole hell of a lot about y'all's business."

Salem laughed. He said, "That's why he's still welcome around these parts."

Longarm said, "Well, what do you reckon my chances are of getting up to see Asa? I take it his last name is Colton?"

Salem shrugged and looked sideways at the two men on either side of him. He said, "Well, I say they're pretty good." He smiled. "We kind of think the best of gents that give old Morton a face full of revolver steel. He ain't one of our favorite kinfolk. You might say that any enemy of Morton's is a friend of ours. If his last name wasn't Colton, the son of a bitch would have been dead about five times over, I can tell you that."

Longarm put his hands on the table. He said, "Well, what's the next move?"

Salem Colton said, smiling wickedly, "Well, the next thing is for you to finish that glass of pop-skull you've got sitting in front of you, and then we'll all get to bed and sleep on it and in the morning, I'll see. Frank, did you plan on going on up there?"

Frank Carson looked over at Longarm and then back to Salem. He said, "Well, no, not actually, but I don't have any pressing business back in town, and there are a few things I guess I could talk to Asa about on my order. My time's getting pretty close, I need to be getting on out of here and headed back to Tennessee with some whiskey."

Salem got up and he said, "My old woman will show you where you can bed down. I'll see you in the morning. Come on, boys." With that, the three men walked across the long room and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway.

Longarm looked at Carson. "What now?"

Carson reached for his glass. He said, "Well, right now, I guess we'd a-better not let Salem find these glasses sitting here with this bone-breaking stuff still in them. We'll see in the morning."

Longarm picked up his glass with a groan. He said, "Lord, this is a hard business. Couldn't we maybe just pour this stuff out on the floor?"

Frank Carson shook his head. He said, "Naw, it'd burn right through these wood planks. They'd be sure to notice the holes in the morning."

Longarm nodded. He said, "Yeah, I just hate to think of what I'm doing to my stomach and my gullet."

"The sooner this is down, the sooner we're down. I'm dog weary and ready for bed."

That night, Longarm lay on a hard cot, his mind racing, while he listened to Frank Carson snoring lightly across the room. It seemed to him that he was doing exactly the very thing that Billy Vail had warned him not to do. He had taken himself back into a very nest of the moonshiners and was about to get even deeper. On top of that, there was Morton Colton who he felt, sooner or later, would have to be dealt with. It could be that if Colton were to follow him back into the hills and get in among his kinfolks, that blood in the end might turn out to be thicker than their disgust for him if it came to a fight between kin and Longarm. But the worst part, in Longarm's mind, was the very startling information that a couple of Treasury agents gone wrong were involved. He had no idea how he planned to handle them. What he desperately needed to do was to get to a telegraph and wire Billy Vail to have the agents recalled before they ever knew about him or his arrival. He might suddenly find himself in the midst of a whole clan of people with rifles who knew how to use them.

But then there was the matter of the whiskey. It seemed to him that if he was going to clean up the mess, he would have to buy some whiskey, and it appeared the least they would sell him was 2,000 gallons and that, at the price quoted, was $2,500. He didn't have near that kind of cash. All he had on him was about $600 of his own money. He could get the sum by bank wire, but the only bank he knew of that was big enough to handle a bank wire was in Little Rock. He sure as hell couldn't go back there, not, at least, as a whiskey buyer. He could go back there as a marshal and arrest several people, but that wouldn't be doing the job he had been sent to do. He fretted over all the different angles of the matter until finally his tiredness and the strike of the white lightning overtook him, and he fell into a troubled sleep.

The next morning before breakfast, Carson told Longarm that he would be willing to accompany him on to Asa Colton's place. He said, "But I want to make it real clear to you, Mr. Long, that I am not standing good for you. I ain't lending you any of the prestige it took me a good number of years to work up with these folks. They trust me. You get your trust on your own. I'll tell Asa Colton just exactly that. We square on the matter?"

Longarm shrugged. "Hell, Frank. I ain't asking you to go my bond. All I want to do is buy some whiskey. If they are willing to sell it to me, I'll buy it, though I don't much like the price. It appears to me that they're charging me a sizable amount more than they are you."

"Let me give you some advice on that matter. If they sell you some whiskey, you'd better buy it at the price they name. They don't Presbyterian around the amount, if you take my meaning. You ain't going to barter or beat them down. Now, if you buy that first load and they take a liking to you, then the price will come down by itself, you won't have to ask. But if they think you're trying to get at them, they won't sell you a thimbleful. The first thing you'll see is a man with a rifle telling you to get off the place. The problem is that all the way back to Little Rock, you're on somebody named Colton's place."

"That sounds just dandy," Longarm said. "Hell, buying whiskey is just about as much fun as getting caught in a stampede. When I set out to come down here, I thought a man just walked up, announced his order, paid for it, and left. This is getting more complicated than the first time I tried to get on top of a young girl on her porch swing and us both fully dressed."

Carson barely smiled. He said, "You'll think fucking in a swing is a piece of cake next to this business. Let's get some breakfast and get on the road."

"You mean there's a road?"

"You know what I mean."

They arrived at Asa Colton's place about mid-morning. It had not been far, but the meandering around through the cuts and draws and around the craggy little hills and avoiding places that Frank Carson advised were best to avoid had all taken time. It had taken them better than two hours to cover the six or seven miles. They rode into the big clearing to the tune of the baying of a pack of hounds located somewhere beyond the clump of buildings that was the settlement of the head of the Colton clan. Since the hounds didn't materialize, Longarm figured they were penned. He figured they were probably coon dogs, taken out at night to run coon or fox or maybe even bear. As they came into the clearing and stopped, Longarm heard a man yelling "Hush!" at them and they quieted immediately.

Asa Colton's place was much like Salem's except it was a great deal bigger. The house was more log than it was rock and was more rock than it was lumber. It looked to Longarm that, at one time, it had been a big log cabin that had just grown from there. There were quite a number of outbuildings, barns, and sheds, and the like. From over the roof of the house, the air was thick with steam and smoke from what he reckoned to be fifteen or twenty stills all going at once.

As they sat their horses, waiting about fifty yards from the house, a man carrying a rifle came around the corner. He stopped and shaded his eyes, apparently recognizing Frank Carson. He made a motion, waving them in. Carson started his horse in, and Longarm followed. They rode up to the porch and dismounted. Carson introduced the man as John Colton, one of Asa's sons. He was a big, burly man that Longarm took to be in his late thirties. On the ride down, Carson had told him that Asa was a man in his mid-fifties and widowed. He had two sons, Mark and John, and one daughter, Sally, in her mid-twenties. He gave Longarm a look. He said, "Now, the first thing you're going to want to do is get a-hold of Miss Sally. My advice is not to try that. Asa's almighty proud of that girl, and he's discouraged any number of suitors. It's going to take somebody that Asa thinks is highfalutin and proper enough to win Miss Sally's hand."