Drake Bassett kicked at one of several broken whiskey kegs that littered the ground. Pike Hardesty had brought him up to the butte overlooking town to see for himself the damage that had been done. Drake was used to opposition; he had learned how to crush it. But this Masked Marauder was turning out to be as hard to pin down as campfire smoke. The man Bassett had hired to sell whiskey to the Blackf eet lay on the grass groaning. He hadn't been shot—just forced to drink a great deal of the alcohol-turpentine-tar mixture he'd been selling. The poor sot might have been better off dead, Bassett thought. The whiskey concoction had blinded him. “Get him into town and see if Doc Ken-drick can do anything for him,” Bassett told his henchman. Pike leaned against a scrub juniper, cleaning his teeth with a broken twig. “Sure, boss. Whatever you say.” “I want you to find a way to stop this Marauder,” Bassett said. “He's costing me a fortune, dumping whiskey faster than I can make it.
