Longarm and the Whiskey Woman by Tabor Evans Page B

"Tell me one thing. There's something I don't understand. Yesterday, you wouldn't give me the time of day. Today, you're going to a considerable amount of trouble to keep me out of jail. You got a reason for that? Why would you help me?"
    Carson said, "What you don't understand is that I'm not so much helping you as I'm hindering Morton Colton. I can't stand the son of a bitch; I hate him. One of these days, I'm going to let some air through him. If I wasn't such a peaceful good old boy, I'd already have done it."
    "I didn't think you knew him. That day at the poker game, you acted like you didn't know him. You acted like you wanted to beat the hell out of him."
    Carson laughed slightly. "Oh, I know him. He just doesn't know that I know him. So far as beating the hell out of him, you were standing there with a fistful of a big revolver and I didn't figure you were going to let me or anybody else do anything. By the way, I noticed you used that revolver with a good deal of ease."
    Longarm said, "I noticed that you wear a cutaway holster, yourself."
    "Comes in handy in this business."
    "Well, you've all but told me that you're in this business, but the other day you claimed to know nothing about it. Now I find out that you not only know Morton Colton, but you know the family, at least you know where they live because that's where we're headed, according to you. What is it exactly that you do?" Longarm said.
    Carson gave him a glance. He said, "You'll find out soon enough, so I might as well tell you. I reckon if I can go to the trouble and the risk of pulling your bacon out of the fire, I can trust you with some information that's pretty nearly common knowledge among those in the know around here. I'm a whiskey buyer. I buy whiskey from these moonshiners here in Arkansas for my family's distillery in Tennessee."
    For a moment, Longarm didn't speak. He didn't know much about the whiskey business except he knew what he liked, but what Carson had just said didn't make much sense to him.
    By now, it had come good dark and the first stars of the evening were beginning to get up. They had ridden through the lowlands of the foothills and were now into some occasionally severe little hills and hummocks. As they crested the top of one of the steep hills, Longarm pulled his horse up to give him a blow. Carson did likewise. Longarm turned in his saddle and looked back. He could clearly see the lights of Little Rock from the heights of the little hillock. It was difficult to tell how far away the lights were, but judging from the time that had passed, he estimated they had come a good ten miles. The horse was as good an animal as Carson had claimed it was.
    Longarm said, scratching his head, "Now, you know, there's something here I don't exactly understand. Maybe it's because I don't know anything. I came down here with the idea of buying some cheap whiskey and bringing it back to Arizona to make a profit. Yet, here I find myself in the company of a man whose family owns a distillery in Tennessee, which is the next state over, and he's here buying whiskey from these here folks. Do they make that much better a brand of rotgut?"
    Frank Carson got a cigar out of his pocket and after offering it to Longarm and getting a shake of his head, stuck it in his own mouth and lit it with a match. When he had the cigar drawing good, he said, "No, it ain't better. Raw whiskey is raw whiskey. We buy this whiskey for two reasons: one, it's cheaper--they can sell it for about a dollar a gallon. It costs us nearly twice that much to distill our own raw whiskey. You get the taste of whiskey and the smoothness of whiskey in the way you age it and the way you handle it, so you see, that's why the raw whiskey they make is just as good as the raw whiskey that we make. But they've got another edge on us. Their raw whiskey is a higher proof than ours. You know what proof means, don't you?"
    Longarm nodded, "Yeah, I drink one-hundred-proof Maryland bourbon whiskey.