“Roomier than a coffin, John. See if anyone has left some food out here. Sometimes they do. Check that pile in the corner.”

“My Lord. Look at this,” John said when he had pulled back the canvas to reveal stacks of whiskey boxes.

“Son of a bitch,” Sisson said. “That there's a lot of whiskey.”

John pulled a bottle out of the open box. He uncorked it, sniffed, and took a pull at it.

“That ain't ours,” Sisson said.

“It ain't all that good, either. But the only thing worse than bad whiskey is no whiskey. They's plenty. They won't miss one bottle.” He held the bottle out to Sisson.

“Someone will miss it. This one bottle is twenty dollars or so. That's near to a week's pay for most folks.”

“You going to fret or drink? Billy Hendricks is running whiskey. I'll be damned. I never would have thought it. Not Billy.”

Sisson sighed and took a pull. “Once you get it past your mouth, it feels pretty good going down.”

“Yeah,” John said. “You get stuck out in an old line shack, there are worse things to get stuck with.”

Sisson looked at something he had seen earlier—a little thumbnail scorpion, the kind that sting worse than the ones ten times their size, hanging on to the boards of the shack. He stoppered the bottle and pressed the bottom of it onto the scorpion, grinding it into the wood. “I guess that's right.”

“Sisson? Tom knew right where this line shack was, didn't he? Like he had been here before, right?”

“I know what you're thinking.”

“This here's Tom's whiskey. It ain't Hendricks's. He's just letting Tom store it here.”

“That's a probability.”

“How much you think this whiskey is worth? There's, what, fourteen cases of it? And part of another.”

“I don't know, John. A lot. I know that. It's a lot.”

“Is all of this, all of this—Old Man, the law we shot, this running to Mexico, and hiding out and all. Is this all part of Tom's whiskey business? I mean, is all this trouble, all this killing just business, Sisson?”

“John, I don't know. I just don't know.”

“But it could be, right? I'm right, ain't I? It could be.”

“It could, but I don't know. It's Tom's business. That's all this is.”

“I know,” John insisted. “I do, too, know. It's Tom's business. That's all this is.”

Sisson shook his head. “No, John. You don't know. You think you know it all. It's a possibility. You got to admit that, but it ain't a certainty, just a possibility. Don't go jumping on conclusions. Don't go putting everything at risk on a possibility.”

“I know. I know for certain. This is all Tom's doing. This whole business just stinks of Tom.”