The Whiskey Baron Read Free

bootleg trade and Tull was overseeing the Hillside Inn. Since Watkins’s death, Tull had moved back to the plant and left Depot Murphy to cover the Hillside. What all went on in the soda plant, only a few men actually knew, but the entire town had made its collective judgment.
    The country had been dry twelve years now, but even in times when money was too tight to drink a sweet water, people still seemed to find the money to buy liquor. Half the town’s residents—good churchgoing folks—were irate about its mere existence and wanted Chambers to shut Tull’s business down. But the other half of town, even if they didn’t go in for all the debauchery, bought whiskey off Tull, including Chambers himself, and to shut down the Hillside meant to shut whiskey out of Castle County. Even some of the good churchgoing folks didn’t want that. Of course, the system of turning a blind eye was over now that there had been a double murder.
    Folks who farmed out here still knew the value of hard work, no matter who bought their crops. All they seemed to want was to be left alone, more and more now that the railroad was coming through and the population was growing. Chambers didn’t have much sense for how the economy worked, but he figured if the country ever made it out of this downturn it wouldn’t take long before no one would be able to just own a farm and live off it. They’d either have to deal in tobacco or find work in the mill for as long as that lasted. Everyone was secure in the mills now, but Chambers was old enough to know the world moved in cycles, and that some new thing was coming, maybe not in this generation, but the next or the next, that would limit what their sons could do if all they knew how to do was work a loom.
    Chambers nodded to the neighbors, walked back down the slope to the Hillside porch. In the darkness Depot sat on a rail with his foot propped up. A bowling pin head, razor-close hair and a ruddy Irish face. A lazy eye that made him look dumb, which might helpif you had to control a bunch of drunks by yourself night after night. He didn’t speak when the sheriff approached, and Chambers leaned against the opposite rail.
    “Furman.”
    “Long night.”
    “Aye.”
    “I heard it was a slow day. Anyone else here other than you and Ernest and Lee?”
    “No, just us.”
    “Well what happened?” Chambers asked. To the man’s continued silence, he said, “Depot, I know what goes on in there, and I’m not aiming to stop it tonight. You don’t have to tell me what you was doing, just what happened to them boys lying in the road. How’d they get there?”
    “They were in the back telling stories—”
    “And no one else was here? Larthan?”
    “Just us,” Depot said again. “Anyway, we was killing time. I was joking with them from the bar, when Mary Jane Hopewell walks in carrying his 12 gauge. ‘God almight,’ I says to him, and the boys just stared.
    “‘This don’t concern you, Depot,’ Mary Jane says to me, and I says, ‘Like hell it don’t.’
    “‘I won’t be long,’ he says.
    “I thought about grabbing my own gun, but he raised the 12 gauge and says, ‘I won’t mess up your place. I just need a moment with these two boys,’ and he points to Ernest and Lee. They were just drinking, not causing anybody any harm, but I imagine they were pretty drunk because they stood up and didn’t seem to mind at all someone waving a shotgun around and looking for them. ‘Let’s go boys,’ Mary Jane says to them.
    “‘We ain’t going nowhere,’ Ernest says.
    “‘Yeah, what do you think you’re doing?’ Lee says.
    “‘I know what I’m doing and why,’ Mary Jane says.
    “‘Hellfire,’ Ernest says and slams his whiskey. ‘We were leaving anyway.’
    “The three of them walked out of the bar, and a few moments later Mary Jane shot them here in the street.”
    When Depot finished his tale, Chambers brushed his hair with his hand. Depot’s story was straightforward