Luella was hungry, so Emaline heated some potato soup and sweet corn and sat yawning while Luella told one story after another. At last, she wound down. Emaline made up the bed in the spare room for Jake’s sister and went back to bed. After a few hours of troubled sleep, she woke to find Jake and Luella already up and whispering as they dressed and went out. She thought they might stay in bed at least until six, but apparently Luella rose as early as Jake himself. Emaline tried to go back to sleep, but there was something about that Ford Runabout and its contents that troubled her. She got out of bed, tiptoed to the kitchen window, watched as Jake backed the truck up to the barn door and they began unloading what appeared to be big brass pots, sacks of something that might have been oats or corn, lengths of copper tubing, a small stove. It took them twenty minutes to get it all into the barn.

They came in hungry, wanting breakfast. Emaline got going on eggs, bacon, coffee, and oatmeal. Luella told some story about Jake and his brothers when they were young, how they had turned the bulls out to fight while old Ike McCloskey was away. There were seven or eight bulls and they tore up Ike’s prized corn planter, purchased brand-new from Chicago that winter. The brothers got the bulls back in the corral and propped the planter up so that it looked as though nothing had happened. It was midwinter and they had almost forgotten the incident in the spring when Ike brought out his team, hitched them to the prized planter and popped his whip. The big draft horses leaned into the harness and lurched forward and the planter fell apart, dumping the old man on his seat right there in front of the house, where he sat bellowing, “Boys, get the hell out here!”

Luella slapped her thigh and laughed her honking laugh and Jake slapped his thigh and they both laughed until they cried. It was not until he came up for air that Jake noticed Emaline wasn’t laughing.

“What’s the matter, hon? Aint that just about the funniest thing you ever heard?”

“I want to know what that was you put in our barn.”

“Why, it was a hog feeder.”

“Do you think I’m stupid? Since when do you need kettles and copper tubing and a heater for a hog feeder? You’re putting a still in our barn, aren’t you?”

“Em, what makes you think that?”

“We had a neighbor up in Wyoming who ran a still. I saw it a time or two when my stepfather went to buy liquor.”

“Well, if you know what it is, why do you ask?”

“Because I want to know what it’s doing on our land.”