Kite hesitated, then he nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, that’s so, Chase. What about it?”
Chase leaned back. “Amos made a fool of you,” he said. “He’s going to turn this town dry, with the man you helped elect.”
Kite flushed; he leaned toward Chase with narrowed eyes peering out from an ambush of wrinkles; and then suddenly he threw back his head with his long, turkey neck rising raw and red from his collar, and he laughed cacklingly, so that customers in the front of his store looked that way to share the joke. Chase frowned angrily. “Well?” he snapped, “what’s funny about that?”
Kite dropped a dry old hand on Chase’s arm. “Oh, Chase,” he choked through his mirth, “the notion of Wint making this town dry....”
Chase flushed. He started to speak. Kite interrupted: “Now don’t get mad. Course, he’s your son, but he does like his drop now and then, Chase.”
“I tell you, Amos is planning to do it.”
There was something so deadly sure in Chase’s tone that Kite sobered and looked toward him. “Say, what makes you say that?” he demanded. “How do you know?”
“Amos has sense. He sees this question is the big one in this state. He’s out for Congress again. He’s not going to have it thrown at him that his man let this town soak itself illegally.”
For the first time, Kite began to look worried. “Amos wouldn’t do that. He told me—”
“Told you? He told me many things, too. But none of them were true.”