Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/39

Rh the loafers, and both seemed to find the climate suited their temperaments. Most of the loafers congregated in Metzal. All of them had one grievance, the airing of which they never ceased. This was Prohibition. The Mexicans made pulque and mescale. Nothing can stop a Mexican from slicing cactus and agave and fermenting their juices. He needs no still, no formidable, clumsy apparatus; his chief ingredients grow everywhere. But the loafing whites, who hung about the poolrooms and gambled with each other, or tried to set traps for taking away the money of the cattlemen and ranchers, by methods most indifferently honest, craved the whiskey with which they were saturated and, being no longer able to buy it in the labeled bottle, or from bond, surreptitiously consumed a substitute.

Metzal was far from the Federal authorities. The local officials were elected from the old regime. Metzal would vote "wet" and "no license" as long as the statutes were unrevoked. The sale of dubious liquor was winked at. If it was served from ginger-ale bottles it was more by way of a joke than by necessity. There were half a dozen so-called distillers of "forty-rod", "lightning" and "squirrel" whiskey. None of it was good, but that manufactured by Vasquez, who had a holding on the edge of the town, where he bred dogs and children, with his predilections slightly in favor of the first, was more fiery, more deadly than the rest.

Metzal was half a mile or more from the depot. It straggled along the banks of the creek and, when