“Driven out by the government?” echoed Frank.
“Sure,” was the easy reply, “and now to answer your last question—that thing my young shipmate Lathrop calls a ‘funny pot’ is a whisky still and these folks you see around us are moonshiners. There’s a price on the head of most every one of them,” concluded Ben.
The boys looked their questions. Their amazement prevented them speaking.
“Yes,” continued Ben in a low voice, “most of the older ones has dropped a ‘revenue’ at one time or another. Poor devils, if you’d ever seen the way they were hounded you maybe wouldn’t blame ’em so much.”
“Were you ever a moonshiner, Ben?” asked Lathrop in an awed tone.
Ben winked with a wink that spoke volumes.
“Say a friend of the moonshiners, younker, and you’ll be near it,” he replied. “I used to keep a kind of traveling store to help the boys out.”
From which the boys gathered that at one period of his adventurous career the versatile Ben had been a “runner” of moonshine whisky—as the man is called who, at great risks, carries the poisonous stuff into the outer world from the secret mountain stills where it is made. The coincidence of Ben meeting his old friends on the island was after all not so remarkable as it seemed. Since the government has run most of the moonshiners out of the Tennessee and North Carolina mountains hundreds of them have taken refuge in the keys and among the ’glades where their product finds a ready market among the Seminoles—who gladly destroy themselves with “whyome” as they call the product of the illicit stills.
The boys soon found out that it was one of the moonshiners who had tried to get Frank’s revolver from under his pillow while he slept—not with intent to do him any harm but because the sight of the weapon earlier in the evening while they had been singing round the camp-fire—watched as it now appeared by a hundred keen eyes—had excited his desire to own it. The mystery of the motor-boat that kidnapped poor Pork Chops, however, was in no wise cleared up, and as the boys and Ben sat down to a meal of yellow corn pone, broiled wild hog, pompano, fried plantain and a sort of orange preserve, to which they did ample justice, the subject occupied most of their thoughts and conversation. As they ate the moonshiners shyly watched them with their wild, hunted eyes. They refused to sit down to eat with the party of adventurers, but flitted about evidencing much interest at the boys’ table manners and their plain embarrassment at having no other table utensils but their fingers.
The meal concluded, Ben lit his pipe and gave himself up to after-dinner contemplation. The boys wandered about the camp unchecked. The moonshiners seemed even disposed to be friendly, in an offish sort of way, after Ben’s endorsement of the boys. One of them approached them with a pannikin full of the colorless stuff from the still. He explained that they distilled it from fields of cane they had in another part of the island.