The bar manager was a Scot named Oliphant with red-gold close-cropped curls gone silver at the temples, a stout man who rose only to Jamie’s shoulder but whose eyes followed him as if not trusting him. Jamie liked him. Oliphant slipped him a sheet of paper with the name of a printer in Concord and Jamie took his day off to ride the train south and make arrangements for labels. The bottles he ordered directly from a glassworks in western New York State. It was understood he’d do no trade where he worked. The distillation of potatoes he diluted by a quarter and held in glass carboys for three weeks with a cheesecloth bundle of juniper needles suspended in the liquid and then decanted into bottles with gin labels attached; the corn liquor he bottled straight with a coloring of caramelized sugar and this was his scotch. The labels were not copies of any in existence but they looked right. He sold only to men he knew and then in case lots; he sold nothing directly to guests, of his hotel or any other, but to desk clerks and dining room managers and headwaiters and barbers and stablemen. He sold to the small underground nightclubs. That first summer he would not sell to local men not associated with the hotels but during the next winter he slowly expanded and so met Wells and Terry. Brothers by nature, stature and inclination but not blood; both woodchuck-faced, hard-muscled men going soft from no longer working in the woods; both with the tang of woodsmoke and bacon grease year-round to their clothes. Strong yellow teeth showing black rot along the edges. Terry the larger and taller of the two, Wells with his temper riding him like a bull thistle down his shirtfront. Together they traveled the north country from Island Pond in Vermont east to Millinocket in Maine, servicing the lumber camps and mill towns, once every month or six weeks coming through Bethlehem with their heavy wagon drawn by a six-horse hitch of big-barreled roan Belgian geldings, year round. Jamie trusted them. They knew what they were doing and did it quietly and without pretense or show. Jamie distrusted flair.

By the summer of 1909 they’d been there five years and their lives had taken on a pattern of satisfaction and accomplishment. He was now bar manager. And he had the liquor business. The local and state police were his customers. The federal men were farther north along the border and he had no interest in going to Canada for cheap liquor. He had no need. Binter was wrapped like a Christmas present; he bought all the farmer could produce. He drove a T-model Ford new off the line the winter before. He’d bought the small house in the tamarack stand the year before, the house with eighteen acres along the river, the sheep pasture and an old meadow grown up to alders and poplars and briars and young birch just beyond the sway-backed barn where he kept cases of liquor under a mound of rotted hay as well as a team of hot bay trotting horses and a sleigh for the deep winter when the Ford was no good at all and a high-wheeled gig for the brief weeks when the frost went out of the ground. In the early afternoons which were his mornings he would stand before the mirror shaving and remind himself that he was small-time. No Diamond Jim. He liked doing this. It was true but also somewhat of a joke. He had just started. He was in good shape and happy. He hadn’t exceeded his expectations. He was twenty-five years old.