'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.'
