Chapter XXI: An Illicit Enterprise

Next morning, very early indeed, we three men set out in Lewis’ faithful little car, for I refused to be left behind.

“Maybe I am old,” I protested, “and I know I’m rheumatic; but I can keep up with you fellows yet. I’m just as much interested in getting Lewis out of jail as you possibly can be.”

Somers accepted my company rather ungraciously, commandeered the field glasses, which Peter had brought back from France, and his army automatic. “For,” he explained, “we might have trouble.”

He drove the panting flivver up the hill behind Fort House, then along the main road toward Hokesville, ten miles away. Two miles outside the village he turned abruptly to the left, into one of the innumerable sandy tracks, which wound away through the stumps and scrub oaks on either side. This country was all lumbered over, thirty years ago; for miles our roads run through a bleak desert of oak saplings and dwarf pines, too small even for firewood, with here and there a tall, lone, half-dead pine tree, whose trunk bears the old scars of the turpentiners, mourning the vanished forest, dying of loneliness for its mates, who have long since been changed into houses and mine timbers and the spars of ships.

It is a desolate country, which has been burned over and reburned, until no grass will grow, and the pale sand lies naked and arid between the scrub oaks and dwarf pines, or stretches for acres, black and forbidding, with the ash of recent fires, which rises in choking clouds at every step. Through it the main roads wind as through a wilderness, though in the sand hills one finds the best land for peaches, tobacco, or cotton, which our State affords. But the roads run over the hills, and the arable land lies in bottoms, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The farmhouses are there, too, quite out of sight from the roads. To reach them one must turn into a narrow, sandy track, such as ran on before us now, winding between blackened stumps; a track indistinguishable to the stranger from the dozens of tote roads made by long gone lumbermen, which lead nowhere. It is a difficult country for the motorist with engine trouble.

The road we followed brought us to no farmhouse. It wound on and on among pine stumps and scrub oaks, swerving to dodge rotten logs here and there, leading us through unexpected patches of vivid bloom, through burnt-over areas, where the dust rose blindingly. At last it dipped into a hollow, where tall pines still grew, untouched by the ax, and ran across a creek--a “branch,” they call them here--through which the flivver splashed vigorously and stopped abruptly on the rise of the hill beyond.

Somers snapped off the ignition and clambered out. “Come on,” he said; “we walk from here.”

He led the way up a steep, sandy slope, which gave treacherously beneath our feet. Burrs clung to my trousers, and I clutched at brambles and tore my hands. Then we came suddenly and simultaneously to the top of the hill and the edge of the pine grove. Before us was a thin screen of bushes and scrub oaks, and beyond that a wide, bare, rolling plain. Below us was a small cornfield; and a quarter of a mile away I saw the dark green of tobacco; but, for the most part, the ground was fallow, covered thinly with bunch grass, already turning yellow in the July sun.

Near the tobacco field was a small, bare, log structure, its interstices well plastered, a brick fireplace opening outward upon its hither side, a drying house for tobacco, such as are scattered all over this State. Save for that the plain was empty; it held no human habitation, nor any sign of man.

“Humph!” said I. “What are we going to do here?”

Somers grinned. “Looks innocent enough, doesn’t it? A tobacco field and a drying house; some cotton”--he pointed to a field beyond the tobacco, which I had not noticed--“and a little of last year’s crop piled under a shed. Bad year for cotton, you know; farmers are holding that in hopes of another forty-cent market. But just you wait and watch!”

Even as he spoke I saw a team of mules emerge from the pines beyond the clearing. They drew a creaking wagon loaded with something bulky; at that distance I could not make out what it was.

Somers focused Peter’s field glasses. “One, two, five bales,” he counted. “There’s money on that wagon, unk! What? Bales of cotton, that’s what they are. But you watch!”

The wagon creaked slowly on; it seemed to crawl. I waited impatiently for what seemed an hour, but was really fifteen minutes, I suppose. Then the mules reached the drying house and stopped. I heard very faintly that queer, crooning whistle our teamsters use instead of the Northern “Whoa!”

The door of the log hut opened; two men emerged. “Who are they, man?” I asked eagerly. “Here, give me the glass!”

“Wait!” ordered Somers. “Ralph Satterfield and Charlie Bates. I don’t know the man on the wagon--some old chap with a long beard. Now they’re beginning--now look!”

He thrust the glasses into my hands, and I focused them with trembling fingers. Then the distant scene leaped into my eyes--the log house, the mules, the men, almost lifesize. They had unloaded the wagon and were cutting the wires, tearing the bales of cotton apart!

“What on earth?” I asked in a whisper. They seemed so close that I feared they would hear me. “What are they doing? Ah-h!”

I could see now. The loose cotton of the first bale fell away, revealing the rounded outlines of a keg--no, a full-sized barrel. “Is--is it----”

Somers nodded grimly. “It is! Whisky, a barrel in each bale. Worth two thousand dollars a barrel at bootleg prices. They’re doing this by wholesale, unk! Pinelands could never consume all that booze. They must be shipping it North. I wonder, now, how they camouflage it on the next lap?”

Peter reached impatiently after the glasses, but I put him back. “Wait, just one minute, boy. I want to see.”

The back of that huge, booted stranger, who had driven the wagon, seemed oddly familiar. Satterfield and Bates I recognized readily enough; they faced me. But this other? I felt that I must know him, too; if he would only turn!

“Ah-h-h!” I sighed. “I know him, too! Here, Peter.” I thrust the field glasses at him and turned to Somers. “Man, I know that big fellow with the whiskers! That’s Lafe Rutledge--Roaring Lafe, he calls himself. And the last time I saw him, the only time I ever saw him, was on Doctor Gaskell’s front porch, the day before the murder. He was shouting at the maid that Gaskell had until sun-up to settle with him!”

“Humph!” said Doctor Somers. Then he drew us back, and we retreated cautiously through the pines and down the long slope to where the flivver stood. Here our leader stopped.

“You both got a good look?” he asked. “You could swear to all three of those men?”

We nodded. “But of course we don’t _know_ there was whisky in those barrels,” objected Peter. “We couldn’t swear to that.”

Somers chuckled. “You needn’t, old son. I’m no prohibition agent, you know, but we’ve got to convince Satterfield that we’ve got this on him. Uncle George there would be a bad liar, I’m afraid. No doubt you’d do better at it.”

Peter bowed in mock acknowledgment of this dubious compliment. “But what are you after?” he asked. “Let’s get it straight, so we can back you up; the virtuous Mr. Uhlman to the limits of fact, and me all the rest of the way.”

“I’m as good a liar as either of you boys!” I protested, somewhat hurt, and they both laughed uproariously.

“Here it is, then,” said Somers more seriously. “By hanging around Minnie Satterfield and drinking with her father I’ve learned a lot about this business. They’re handling corn whisky, moonshine, by wholesale. It’s made up in the mountains and brought down here once or twice a week, sometimes by truck and sometimes, like to-day, on a lumber wagon. It’s only about forty miles, you know. They make the trip a different way every time, and a different man drives, so nobody’ll notice. The whisky comes in barrels, hidden in a fake cotton bale, or in kegs put up in grocery boxes, like canned goods. They notify Satterfield by phone, at night; makes it awfully handy to have Minnie as operator, you see; saves a leak at this end. And Satterfield meets them out here. I had a time locating this place and finding a way to get out here without being seen. Then I wasn’t sure but the booze would come out that road we took, and they’d find the flivver; in which case, Peter, your pistol might have been useful.

“Well, they repack the liquor here; I don’t know how. Bates hauls it down to Pinelands, or over to Hokesville, along with his peach crop--he has an orchard over beyond the clearing--and ships it North. Oh, it’s a flourishing business which they do!

“And here’s my scheme. If Satterfield didn’t kill Gaskell himself, and I’m beginning to doubt that--I got pretty intimate with him, you know--if he didn’t do it, he knows who did, and why. Doctor Gaskell found something, I imagine; located this cache, perhaps, and the gang decided to wipe him out before he could squeal. Gaskell was a mighty decent chap, they say, not one to stand for bootlegging. I don’t think Satterfield did the killing himself, but he knows something. Now to-night we’ll corner him and call for a showdown. Then what we find out will depend on whether he’s more afraid of being arrested for murder or of losing his job. And these mountaineer liquor runners are pretty tough characters, some of them. It’s quite possible that he will take a chance of being tried for the shooting, rather than let the rest of his gang believe he’s turned them up. Get me?”

“We do, old top!” declared Peter. “We sure do! Oh, boy, you’ve got a bean. We’ll have this little old murder cleared up like winking, and Parker ready to take his wife into that little red-and-white bungalow as soon as they planned--even if this has been a pretty tough honeymoon for both of them.”