Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 72: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

= : —— and Jeff stumbled, and when he picked himself up, Ed kicked him. The last seen of Jeff Barnes he was lop- ing toward the Vingo depot. It was misty, and he hadn’t gone very far before he was swallowed up. A northbound train was ~ due in a few minutes, and I suppose he caught it. He has never been seen in Vingo since, and I am pretty sure he never will. We found a railroad lantern in the wood- shed and we lit it. There was no still in the ~ woodshed. “You boys have been hanging around oe here enough to have some suspicion where it is,” I told Ed and Jim. But they didn’t know. _“ Tye smelled mash around here, just like I smell it now,” Ed said. Christine and Belinda came in, and they sniffed the air. They both smelled mash, but there was no still in the woodshed. Nothing but some rusty old tools, a pile of crocus sacks, another pile of empty cans and __a fifty-gallon oil barrel. It didn’t dawn on us for a long time how Jeff Barnes had been fooling us. _ Alvina came to the door with Mr. Logan and taunted us. ~“YVou'll never find that still,” she said. “ Tt’s too well hidden.” Then she and her = = Northerner went back to the car. It was Belinda who made the discovery. She picked up one of the empty cans from ‘the pile and looked at the label. The label said lye. She was frowning as she turned the can over and over. ‘“Why did they use so much lye?” she wanted to know, but no one answered. The truth was beginning to dawn on us all. We ought to have guessed it sooner, but our minds were on something else. What we were looking for was a copper worm. - Belinda dropped the can and picked up the lantern. She lowered it into the oil barrel. “Here’s the still,” she said, and we = - crowded around the barrel and looked. There was still a little stuff in the bottom == of the barrel—fifty pounds or so of new sugar. Bad Eye Eely was probably starting another mess when Jeff came back from the ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. “They didn’t ’still it at all!” Belinda cried. “ They mixed the batch in this charred oil barrel and they put in lye to make it work fast!” And that was the truth. The “ double- distilled corn liquor ” that Jeff Barnes had been peddling around, hadn’t even been dis- tilled once. The mixture had simply been placed in the barrel and allowed to work. Lye was added to hasten the -chemical action. And that was the stuff Alvina had recom- mended for babies to drink—-rank poison! That lye gave the stuff a “ kick ’—and it ate out the lining of a man’s stomach and put the devil into his heart. Boiled carrot juice had given it that beautiful honey color. Belinda gave the barrel a vicious little kick. ‘‘ Smash it!” she said. Her mood needed something to smash; so Ed rolled the barrel outside and took an ax to it. And when the barrel was re- duced to splinters, we started back toward my flivver. “You tell her, Buck,” said Christine, “not to come back to our house. You tell her that if she comes back to our house I’m going to shoot her!” The four of them climbed into my flivver, and I strolled on toward the Mercedes. Alvina and young Logan were standing be- side it, very close together, and Alvina was doing the talking. I remember that a rain like fine mist was falling, and that the steam from the swamps was creeping up, clouding the air. Here and there through the thickening mist spots of fire were burning. They were old stumps, rich in turpentine, still smoldering from a bush fire we had had a few days before; but they gave a ghostly air to the picture. It was hot and close—oppressive. The rainfrogs were calling in a high-pitched shrill. It was so high that sometimes when it stopped for a moment you wondered if it hadn’t gone into one of the upper regis- ters above sound. And I remember Alvina’s voice. It was no longer lovely and velvety. It was clear and strident and every now and again it broke. It was the voice of desperation. oO Eomichbooks (S@)