The Butterfly - James M. Cain [6]
"What traffic? We do it at night."
"That's right. Nobody's out at night."
"We don't make any new track or path to give us away. You handle the truck and I handle the falls. If we hear anything I pull up and you drive off, that's all."
"I love it."
"Now we're set, except for one thing."
"What's that?"
"The tank, from the shack. We can't haul that up. We got to pack it by muleback, if I can ever figure some kind of cradle to put it in. We take it to the shaft mouth, then lower it down."
"Well, I bet we can haul it up."
"How do we get it through the tunnel?"
"Oh. Now I see."
"It's just not big enough."
So we went to work, and it split up about even, the things I could do and she couldn't, and the things she could do and I couldn't have made myself do in a hundred years. I'm no mechanic, but I'm handy with tools, and all the stuff that had to be made and connected up, there was no trouble about it, except it took time and was a lot of work. Like I told her, the first thing was the hundred-gallon tank from the shack up the mountainside, but I got a light wagon up there, and when I started down with it there were a couple of places where I had to use planks, ropes, and chocks to work it along, but I had a lot less trouble with it than I expected, and got it to the shaft mouth in one day. Another day saw it lowered down inside, and I could go ahead with my scaffolds. For them I used lumber from the old loading platform of the railroad, and for pipe to connect everything up I used the water pipe of the old filling station. I kept steady at work, and it wasn't very long before I had one deck of tubs, covered over with lids, and one leading to the other, where I trapped the water from the spring, and connected it with my mash tubs, on the next deck, and my still, which was right on the ground. For my heating chamber I used the tank, and for the cooling system the old heater, with the coils reconnected so they ran down through cold water. I figured everything out pretty good, like the intake of cold water down at the bottom, the drain for hot water at the top, so once we got started it all worked almost automatic.
She attended to whatever had to be done in Carbon City, and that was plenty, but I couldn't have gone in there and had people look at me, and know from what I was buying what I was up to. She got the tubs we needed for the water, and for the mash, and the kegs for aging the liquor. Everything had to be small, on account of the tunnel, as I didn't want to drag any more stuff to the shaft mouth than I could help, but nothing gave us much trouble but the kegs. They were supposed to be charred, but I couldn't see that they were, so we had to char them. While I worked on my pipe, she'd fill them with chips and shavings, until they were almost full up to the one end I'd left open after slipping the hoops and taking out the head. When it was going good with the flame she'd roll it around with the hook end of the fire poker she'd brought up from the cabin, until all over the inside was what they call the "red layer." Then we'd souse water in it, and next day I'd put the head back in and tighten the hoops, and we had one more container ready. For all that stuff I gave her money, but it didn't cost as much as I had thought it would, because she got a lot of it second-hand, and beat them down when she could. But some things, I don't know where she could have bought them. For instance, the hydrometer she got, that you have to have to test the proof with, came in a long pasteboard box. And stamped on the box was