Tom, who could ride anything, was good with the burros, and when his entertainment value waned as he stayed on a burro longer and longer, he was invited to help Wootan out as he moved his stock from one county to the next. The burro rodeos were also perfect vehicles for bootlegged liquor, and Tom was happy to help out with that, too. His old connections near Firth's store were able to supply him with a good deal of bad whiskey at a decent price.

But decent wasn't good enough for Bob Wootan. “The liquor is where the money is,” Wootan said. “The burros is just an enticement. We need to make more money on the whiskey.”

“How we going to do that?” Tom asked. “We got every cowboy for forty miles around coming out here and riding and drinking all weekend. We can't take out notices in the paper.”

“Well, we make more money on the whiskey we sell.”

“Can't raise prices too much; whiskey is already twenty dollars a bottle. Cowboys ain't millionaires.”

“No. But we can work the other end—get the whiskey for less.”

“I'm getting a good price on whiskey,” Tom said.

“We can do better. I know where we can get it at half the price we're paying now.”

“Stealing it?”

“Better. Buying it from someone else who's stealing it. The marshal's office has been picking up a lot of illegal whiskey coming in from Mexico. Some of it is destroyed, some is held for evidence. The rest just sort of disappears.”

“And we could buy the disappeared whiskey?”

“Yes we could,” Wootan said. “I got contacts, too. Family connections, you might say.”

Tom considered this. “And this is reliable?”

“Full faith of the United States government,” Wootan said. “And there could be some extra work helping to move the whiskey from one place to another. Because there are people in high position here in this business, and they're looking for others to actually handle the merchandise. It keeps them removed from the evidence.”

“So we would be bootleggers as well,” Tom said.

“More ‘independent distributors,’ I would say.”

“And who's involved in this? Who would we be dealing with?”

“I can't name names. But the US marshal's office is the source.”

“The marshal?”

“Not the marshal, exactly, but close to it.”

“Frank Haynes?”

“You didn't hear that from me.”

Tom started picking up cases of whiskey from Bob's cousin, Kane Wootan, once a week. Half he kept for the rodeos; the rest he was free to sell to others. Eventually, he began just picking up the whiskey himself from an abandoned barn near Dos Cabezas. Bob paid Kane for what they took. There was so much whiskey and so much money that Tom began adding a couple of extra cases as a kind of handling fee. The money was good.

CHAPTER NINE

1915