Moonshine Massacre

Chapter 17

Matt watched until Sam had ridden through the cut in the ridge and was out of sight. Then he turned to go back into the Harlow cabin, but before he reached the door, Frankie came out.

“Come on,” she said. “Pa asked me to show you around the place.”

Matt nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

Any excuse to spend more time with Frankie Harlow was just fine with Matt, even if she was a mite proddy a lot of the time. At the moment, she seemed fairly friendly.

Although not as friendly as she’d been the night before when she was kissing him in the barn, he thought…

She led him past the barn and pointed along the ridge. “See where the smoke’s coming up there, a couple of hundred yards away?” she asked.

“I see it,” Matt said. “Is that where the still is?”

“Yeah. Come on. I’ll show you.”

They walked along the ridge until they came to what appeared to be the mouth of a cave. As they got closer, though, Matt saw that the opening had been shored up and steps had been carved into the earth, leading down.

“There was a little cave here already,” Frankie said, anticipating Matt’s question, “but Pa and the boys dug it out and enlarged it, sort of like a root cellar. Then they ran a pipe up through the ground to vent the firebox on the boiler.” She leaned through the entrance and called, “Don’t get nervous and start shooting, boys. It’s just me and Bodine.”

Matt followed her down the earthen steps, and found himself in a chamber that was partially carved out of the ridge and partially underground. It was about twenty feet by twenty feet, he estimated. A couple of lanterns hung from nails driven into the timbers that supported the roof.

A huge iron boiler dominated the room and made the air hot and moist in the chamber. The Harlows must have assembled the contraption here, Matt decided, because he didn’t think they could have gotten it through the door the way it was now. A copper pipe emerged from the tapering top of the boiler and ran over to a barrel that was connected to a second barrel by another pipe. More barrels that were probably full of moonshine sat on the other side of the chamber.

The four Harlow brothers stood around the room, two of them holding rifles, the other two tending to the fire in the boiler and watching the ’shine drip into the second barrel.

Frankie nodded toward the boiler. “This is Old Skullbuster,” she said with a note of pride in her voice. “My great-grandpappy built her originally. She helped brew up thousands of gallons of white lightning, back in the mountains in Tennessee.”

“More like millions of gallons, I’ll bet,” one of her brothers said.

“My grandpappy used it, too,” Frankie went on, “and then when my pa decided to come west, he took it apart and loaded the pieces on his wagon as careful as he could. We put it back together when we decided to settle here and got this place ready for it.”

Matt nodded. “Mighty impressive. You keep it runnin’ all the time?”

“Nearly all the time,” Frankie said. “Have to let it cool off every now and then, so we can clean out the firebox.” She pointed to the first barrel. “The mash is in there, and the squeezins drip out into the other barrel.”

Matt nodded. It was a simple setup. He had seen moonshine stills before, but Old Skullbuster was probably the biggest he had come across.

“It really only takes a couple of people to tend it and to stand guard,” Frankie continued. “We take turns doing that and working in the fields. We have to keep the corn crop growing so we’ll have it to make the mash. Some folks use grain, but Pa says there’s nothing sweeter than good corn liquor.”

“He just might be right about that,” Matt said with a smile. “What would you like me to do? I reckon I can tend a boiler if I need to.”

Frankie shook her head. “We’ll take care of this part of it, just like we always have. You’re here to kill Cimarron Kane, Bodine.”

Matt stiffened at the casual way Frankie spoke the words. “I told you, I’m not a hired gun. And I’m dang sure not a paid killer.”

“That’s not what I meant. Sooner or later, Kane and his kinfolks will come after us again. That ambush last night was just the start of it. When that happens, we’ll need help fighting him off. That’s where you come in.”

“And if Kane happens to wind up with a slug in him—”

“We dang sure won’t grieve for him,” Frankie said.

Matt understood. “Maybe it would be a good idea if I was to sort of patrol the place. You know, keep an eye out for Kane and his bunch.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say. Let’s go.”

“You’re coming along, too?”

“Pa and the boys don’t need me right now, and it’ll help if you know the countryside hereabouts.”

Matt couldn’t argue with that, so he and Frankie left the cave where the Harlow still was located and returned to the barn. Matt saddled up his stallion while Frankie got a big bay gelding ready to ride.

“That looks like a lot of horse,” Matt commented. “You sure you can handle him?”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew they were a mistake. Frankie snorted contemptuously, gave a defiant toss of her head, practically vaulted into the saddle, and said, “Let’s see you keep up with me, Bodine!”

With that, she galloped out of the barn, and all Matt could do was go after her.

He swung up onto his horse and put the animal into a run. Frankie had already opened up a lead as she raced off to the west, paralleling the ridges. A thin cloud of dust coiled up into the air from her horse’s hooves.

Despite that lead, Matt’s rangy gray stallion soon began closing the gap. The horse wasn’t much for looks, but he had plenty of speed and stamina and could run all day if he needed to. Matt saw Frankie glancing over her shoulder at him. He wasn’t sure what she was trying to prove. Probably that she was as good as her brothers. From what Matt had seen so far, he wasn’t sure but what she was already better.

They flashed past the fields where the family’s corn crop grew. The green leaves and tasseled ears waved back and forth a little as a morning breeze stirred them. The plants were shorter and scrubbier than the ones Matt had seen growing in other, more fertile places, but they had plenty of ears on them. He wondered if the Harlows ever roasted any of those ears, or if they all went to make moonshine.

Still in the lead, Frankie sent her mount curving around the fields and took off toward the south. Matt stayed close behind her, holding his horse in a little now so that he wouldn’t overtake her. He was curious where she was going, and letting her win seemed to be the best way to find out.

A few minutes later, when they were out of sight of the Harlow homestead, Frankie galloped up a long swell of ground and didn’t slow down when she reached the top of it. Her horse was airborne for a second as it crested the slope at a full gallop. Matt reined in his horse even more as he reached the top in time to see Frankie’s mount land nimbly on the far slope and keep running. He would have been willing to bet that she had done this before.

At the bottom of the hill, a creek twisted across the prairie. A few trees stood along its banks. Frankie brought her horse to a stop under one of those trees and slipped down from the saddle.

Matt reached her side a moment later. Frankie was breathing hard from the exhilaration of the gallop. Matt tried not to stare at the way her breasts rose and fell under the red-checked shirt she wore, but it wasn’t easy.

“This is one of my favorite spots around here,” Frankie said as Matt dismounted. She pointed to some low hills rising in the distance. “Those knobs aren’t anything like the Smokies, but at least they’re not just flat prairie. They remind me a little of home, and so does this stream.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty,” Matt agreed. “As pretty as any place around these parts, I guess.”

“You’ve been a lot of places, haven’t you?”

“Quite a few, I reckon,” Matt replied with a nod. “Sam and I have been on the drift for a few years.”

In truth, they had seen almost everything from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, from the Rio Grande in the south to the Milk River in the north. Folks talked about somebody having been to see the elephant. Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves had not only seen the critter on numerous occasions, they had walked right up and shaken hands with it. Or trunks, as the case might be.

“How’d the two of you wind up riding together?”

Matt smiled. “That’s too long a story to tell. Let’s just say we sort of grew up together, way up yonder in Montana. That’s still what we consider home, although we don’t get up there very often.”

“So you just…drift? Don’t you have any ambition?”

“Oh, I reckon we do. It’s just not time for us to worry about it yet. We’re still young, after all.”

Frankie gazed off into the distance. “I have ambition,” she said without looking at Matt. “I want to go to San Francisco and see the ocean. And I’d like to go back home someday, only with plenty of money so that folks would know I was a success.”

“Most people consider a woman a success if she has a good home and family,” Matt pointed out.

Frankie glanced sharply at him. “Well, that’s not the way I look at it,” she snapped. “I don’t need some man to take care of me, when what that really means is burdening me with a whole mess of squalling brats.”

“I guess you just don’t have much of a maternal instinct,” Matt said.

“Never you mind about my maternal instincts.” She led her horse over to one of the trees and looped its reins around the slender trunk, tying them so they wouldn’t slip. “I reckon it’s warmed up enough now.”

“Warmed up enough for what?” Matt asked.

“This,” Frankie said as she lifted her hands to the buttons of her shirt and began to unfasten them.