“I tendered you the key to my little house so that you could use it for living purposes,” he said, “but without any notion that you’d start up in business. From all that I can gather you set out to abate the thirst of the whole Cherokee Nation.”
“Well, the poor devils are fixed up every other way,” Bart explained. “They draw beef rations, flour rations, blanket issues and so on, but nobody’s ever been thoughtful enough to provide them with licker rations, so they’re forced to live a one-sided, unbalanced kind of existence and I was striving to supply the lack and sort of round out their lives.”
“An’ you came near to finishing mine,” Carver stated.
“It was only that once,” Bart defended. “I did dispose of several cases at a right handsome profit and you’ve no notion how much they enjoyed theirselves the next night. It would have done your heart good to have heard it. All Caldwell turned out to listen to the expansive sounds emanating from the Cherokee camp south of town.”
Carver had placed that first illusive impression that Molly Lassiter was in grave need of something without which her life was not quite complete. It was no material requirement but a need that was deeper than that. She despised the ways of the two older half-brothers, who had been practically strangers to her during her own early life, showing up at her father’s home but infrequently. Later, after her own mother’s death, they had returned and made it their home. There had never been any bond between them and herself, and she had feared the effect their ways might exercise upon Bart. Freel had spoken the truth when he asserted that she knew what it was to have the law always barking at her door. Carver knew now that what she most needed was peace,—assurance that the same old conditions would not pertain to her life and Bart’s.
“Why do you put Molly up against that sort of thing?” he demanded.
“She didn’t know,” Bart returned.
“But she’d know if they happened to clamp down on you for it,” Carver insisted. “And that’s what she’s guarding against. She’s always had that sort of thing to fight off.”
“She has for a fact,” Bart admitted. “The old man was a hard citizen himself, way back in his youth. He’d quieted down for a good many years but after the two boys came back he sort of leaned their way again. There’s been times when Molly and me was kids, and left all alone in the house or wherever we happened to be at the time, that folks would come round inquiring about his whereabouts, and the old man hiding out in the hills about them. She thought a lot of him, Molly did, and hated Milt and Noll for leading him off.”
“Then why don’t you shake them?” Carver demanded. “There’s no common bond between you and them, and Molly would be way better off.”