Talcott looked at me and grinned. “You smell anything?” he asked.

“He smells like he took a bath in liquor,” I replied. I looked around. The others were smiling, watching me expectantly. I hunkered down beside the man.

“Buddy, what’s your name?” I asked in a friendly tone of voice.

“Junior,” he said gratefully. “Junior Stamper.”

“Junior. Yall having a party up on that there mountain, Junior? Got lots of liquor up there?”

“Oh, yeah. Old man Collins that owns the hardware store, he bootlegs on the side, you know?”

“His boys up there selling?”

Junior licked his lips. “Oh, yeah. They started out giving and then they commenced selling. And some of the boys has commenced taking. But old man Collins, he’ll git his money outen them one way or tother.”

“Boys laying drunk up there?”

“Oh, yeah. And shooting their guns.”

“They’re shooting their guns at the wind in the underbrush,” Talcott said.

I took him aside. “How’d we find him?”

“Think he wandered away to take a piss and then decided to run for it when he saw nobody was paying him any mind. Only he was so drunk he didn’t know which direction to go in. Run right into our pickets. Except he werent running, he was more like crawling when they found him.” He lit a cigarette. “We could create a diversion somewhere else.”

“We need more men. We need to call the boys over from Beech and Blair. We got to have all of them.”

“No time. Hit will be light in a few hours.”

“Then we’ll send out word. Sit tight tomorry, make them think we’re still holding out. Start pulling back at dusk. They’ll wonder ifn we’re giving up. They’ll keep on drinking, maybe heavier.”

“Chafin will plug Crooked Gap.”

“With what? He wont dare pull men out of Blair. He done sent his reinforcements, and a distillery along with them.”

“He’ll stop them drinking.”

I looked at Talcott steady, with my eyebrows raised. After a moment he started to giggle.

“Hell,” he said. “He aint General Pershing neither.”

I sent out the word to come to the head of Hewitt. Some came before dark, quiet, not so that you would notice, but then there were more of us.

And then Talcott.

I was up the hill with a group of about forty, all of us within their range but hid behind trees. We were shooting less, making them waste their bullets, laughing at the wildness of the racketing above us.

Talcott hunkered down beside me, offered me a bottle of water and I swallowed some.

“Some new boys are up from Madison. The Army’s coming in.”

“Tell me something new,” I said.