THE BELLE FOURCHE

BOOTLEGGER

It was a slow evening in Belle Fourche, the sun had just gone down and there was a gentle breeze rolling in from the east. The smell of freshly cut grass was in the air. As I looked up I could see and hear the birds that were perched in the trees. As I looked even higher, I noticed that the sky was clear and that the stars were beginning to shine. Being sheriff I was obligated to do evening rounds to check stores, so I set out.

Later that evening a man and his wife stopped me and said that they had seen two suspicious looking men loading heavy innertubes into their car, I had a suspicion about who the men were that the couple had described to me. I had more than just a suspicion about what it was they were loading, I knew that it was MOONSHINE. I had met up with them earlier that day and they had taken a shot at me. As I drove up the road to the house in which the two suspects had been seen, I noticed that there was a cloud of dust. Each fine particle of dust gave off a shiny glimmer as my headlights shown on them. This indicated to me that they had just left and in which direction they had gone. I followed the dusty trail in hopes to stop the two and question them. As soon as the two men saw me approaching they started to accelerate, which sent rocks and dust flying into the air. This made me even more anxious to catch the two, so I pulled one of my two revolvers (which I was seldom seen without), from its holster and slowly raised the shiny silver pistol to the window and aimed at the car ahead of me. Not taking any more chances, I fired twice. The first shot being a warning, the second hit the rear window of the car ahead of me.

It was then that I realized where the bootleggers were headed for. They were trying to escape across the bridge which was across the Belle Fourche River at the bend of the junction of the Belle Fourche and Red Water Rivers. When the bootleggers tried to turn the corner for the bridge, which sat almost perpendicular to the road, they started to lose control of their car. They slid sideways, once to the right and once to the left. When the driver of the car ahead of me tried to correct the slide, he over-corrected. The car with the bootleggers in it hit the bridge sideways causing the car to be propelled 15 feet into the air. A tire flew out of the trunk and landed heavily in the water below the bridge. As the car was floating through the air my lights were reflecting off the chrome. When I walked down to the car, there was a smell of moonshine everywhere. When I looked into the car both men were dead, one of them had died from the impact of the car hitting and the other had died from a bullet wound.

As I was searching the car I found that the bootleggers had put the moonshine in the tire tubes. There were the bottles that had been reported, in the trunk and back seat. I went down to the water and found the tire that had come from the trunk when they crashed. It to was filled with moonshine.

Three days later, after I attended the funeral of the two bootleggers whom I had been chasing just a couple of days ago, the surroundings were sad, and it was raining. The people of the town somehow blamed me for the deaths of the bootleggers. They were accusing me of doing my job!

Some weeks later, after the community had shut me out and turned against me, a few friends of the bootleggers` tried to have me prosecuted for the bootleggers deaths. The community didn`t have much of a case though, so when I went to court they really didn`t have much of a chance to actually prosecute me. The judge knew that and let me go.

Most of the people in Belle thought that I was the one that had committed a crime, not the bootleggers, that I had gone on living unpunished, but nothing more ever happened in regard to the bootleggers.