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The Lantern Man of Loon Pond: A Runner's Tale from the Lakes Region

Radio Moonshine · Episode 118 · October 31, 2026 · 31 minutes

Moonshine history comes alive by the campfire as Alchemist G. G. Wilkins tells the Civil War era legend of Obed Crane, the Lantern Man of Loon Pond, who ran barrels past the Belknap County deputies using shuttered dark lanterns, a black punt and a granite ledge echo. Wilkins keeps his eyewitness account apart from the tall tales that grew up around it, and his pet bear Barnaby flatly refuses to cross a sabotaged footbridge. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins shares mountain lore about foxfire trail marks and signal lanterns hidden in a butter churn, and Wilkins answers a listener's question about thump kegs and copper still distilling before he takes apart the old blue-flame proof test on his anvil.

In this episode

Wilkins tells the campfire story of Obed Crane, a lone runner who moved barrels along the shore of Loon Pond in Gilmanton using shuttered dark lanterns, a black punt and the echo off a granite ledge. Wilkins keeps what he saw with his own eyes apart from what the neighbors added later, and the tale includes Barnaby's flat refusal to cross a sabotaged footbridge. Blue Ridge herbalist and slang historian Clara Higgins brings new mountain lore about running with lights at night, foxfire trail marks and signal lanterns hidden in a butter churn. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then knocks down the old blue-flame test with a few strikes on his anvil.

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Full episode transcript

The complete written show for “The Lantern Man of Loon Pond: A Runner's Tale from the Lakes Region”, as heard on Radio Moonshine.

♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar

♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window

Wilkins: Barnaby. Barnaby! Quit rattling that chain like a deacon shaking the poor box. You had a whole ham hock and half a Gilmanton peddler's hat for supper. If you grunt once more I will pull your back teeth and sell them to a Concord lady for a necklace. Down. Down, you great hairy sack of bad decisions.

♦ One last aggrieved bear grunt, chain going slack against the log wall

♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth

Wilkins: Good evening, friends, sinners, and whatever county deputy has his ear pressed to my chinking tonight. You may as well come in, son. The draft is killing you. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. Dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and twice-arrested man of science. Tonight we ride north into the Lakes Region, up Gilmanton way, to a black little water called Loon Pond and a man nobody ever caught. They called him the Lantern Man.

Wilkins: I will tell you what I saw with these two eyes, and then what the neighbors have glued onto it since, the way a drunkard glues turkey feathers to his hat and calls it Sunday best. Barnaby is in the story too. He does not come off a hero. Well. He does, but not the way he would like.

Wilkins: First, a word from the folks who keep my lamp lit.

♪ Quick bright banjo sting

Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960! Heavy-gauge pure copper, handcrafted honest and true! Order yours at moonshinestill.com, or step into the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield. That's moonshinestill.com!

♪ Sting resolves into a fiddle drone

♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settling in the stove

Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Lakes Region, the lights, and the law.

Wilkins: To understand the Lantern Man, first understand the country he ran in. North of us lies Winnipesaukee, the big lake, as wide and as full of islands as a Concord lawyer's bill is full of charges. Since 1849 the side-wheeler Lady of the Lake has gone thrashing out of Lake Village, smoking like a Methodist's first cigar and carrying freight, mail, and pale Boston boarders who come up for the air and leave complaining of the mosquitoes. The railroad brought them, and the railroad brought something else: eyes. Where there are depots there are clerks, where there are clerks there are ledgers, and ledgers draw revenue men the way a dead woodchuck draws flies.

Wilkins: The Lakes towns, Gilmanton, Gilford, Meredith, Alton, sit in Belknap County, which the legislature carved off Strafford County in 1840. A new county is like a new pair of boots: stiff, squeaky, and certain to give somebody blisters. Belknap's blisters were her deputies. Fresh appointed and keen as mustard, every one of them dreaming of the day he'd haul in a real outlaw and get his name in the Laconia paper next to an advertisement for liver pills.

Wilkins: Gilmanton itself is old, hard country. The Iron Works village there got its name from the early forge that smelted bog ore dug out of the swamps and pond bottoms. That's iron that grows in the mud like a fungus, you understand, rusty brown and sullen. I've worked some. It welds like a grudge and rings like a cracked bell. Up among those hills sits Loon Pond. She's not big. You could row her end to end before your pipe went out. But she is deep and dark, ringed with spruce and with a granite ledge standing up bare on the east shore like the forehead of a bald man. At night she is so still you can hear a trout change its mind.

Wilkins: Now for the lanterns. You have all seen a dark lantern. It's a tin box with a chimney on top and a glass bull's-eye in front, and a shutter inside that you slide or turn to hide the flame in a wink. Night watchmen carry them, constables carry them, and burglars carry them, which tells you all three trades are cousins. A dark lantern is like a widow at a church social: she shows you a little light when it profits her and shuts up tight when the deacon walks by. The phrase got so common that men called any secret society a dark-lantern party, and in the fifties half the politicians in this state were members of one and the other half wished they'd been asked.

Wilkins: Now here is a piece of history that ties right to our trade. Before the war, half of New England lit its lamps with burning fluid and camphene, mixtures of alcohol and turpentine. They were cheap and bright, and they were as touchy as a cat in a sawmill. Camphene lit half the parlors in New England and burned down the other half. I pulled a tooth for a Northwood woman who lost both eyebrows and her parlor curtains to a camphene lamp, and she told me that was the less painful afternoon. Then came Mr. Lincoln's war and the federal tax on distilled spirits. Burning fluid is alcohol, so the tax made it dear. Coal oil, kerosene, came rolling in from the Pennsylvania wells and took the lamp trade near overnight. Uncle Abe's tax was meant to wring the whiskey man's neck, and it wrung the lamp man's along with it. That's the government's notion of thrift: kill two birds and send both of them the bill.

Wilkins: One more thing before I tell the tale, and it's natural philosophy. Sound carries over still water at night. On a calm evening the air lying on the pond is cooler than the air above it, and that bends sound back down toward the water like a man stooping to pick up a dropped coin. A whisper on one shore of Loon Pond can be heard on the other, and an oar knocking a thole pin sounds like a pistol shot. Any runner who works water has to learn that. The Lantern Man learned it, and then he turned it against them.

♪ Low fiddle sting, a loon-like slide on the strings

♦ Distant loon tremolo over water, wax crackle

Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. The Lantern Man himself.

Wilkins: His name was Obed Crane. I won't say Obadiah, because nobody but his mother and the census man ever did, and the census man only did it once. Lean, quiet fellow with a jaw like a coal scuttle. He worked a hardscrabble farm on the west side of Loon Pond and ran barrels of other men's spirit down the pond, across the carry, and out to the Alton road for the lake trade. He worked alone. He would not take a partner, and I'll say it was wisdom, because a partner is a man who knows where you sleep.

Wilkins: Now here's my ledger, and I'll keep two columns: what I saw, and what Gilmanton swallowed. The second column runs to four pages. The first fits on my thumbnail, but it's the only one I'll swear to.

Wilkins: What I saw. Autumn of sixty-three, I was called up to Gilmanton to pull a molar from a farmer named Hezekiah Bumpus. That tooth was so rotten it had its own congregation. I went at it with the forceps, Hezekiah went at the ceiling with his heels, and when that molar finally let go it came out with a sound like a boot pulled from a cow flop, roots and all, three of them hooked like a lobster's claws. Hezekiah bled into a basin, cussed in two languages, one of them invented on the spot, and paid me in salt pork and directions to a good camping spot on Loon Pond.

Wilkins: I had Barnaby along in the wagon. I don't leave him home alone with the hens. The last time I did, the hens filed a grievance, or what was left of the hens did. So that night I'm sitting dark at the edge of the pond with my pipe cupped in my hand, the bear snoring in the wagon bed like a sawmill with the catarrh. All of a sudden, up on the north shore, a light. It shows a moment, then goes black. Then another, way over on the east side near the ledge. It shows and it's gone.

Wilkins: Then I hear men. Three of them, Belknap deputies, crashing through the blueberry bushes on the far side, whispering. Remember what I said about sound on water. I could hear one of them complaining that his boots pinched, and another saying he had to make water and would they please wait. That fellow I'll call Deputy Tuttle, because God knows his mother did. Then comes a knocking. Tok. Tok. Tok. Like a mallet on a barrel head. It comes plain as day from the east ledge, off that bald granite face. Off go the deputies around the pond toward the ledge, stumbling and swearing, one of them losing his hat in a spruce. Three Belknap deputies marched around a pond to arrest a rock, and to the rock's credit it did not resist.

Wilkins: And while they were gone, not thirty feet from where I sat, something slid past me on the water. A punt, low and flat, painted black as the inside of a cow. Barrels lashed in the middle. The oarlocks were wrapped in sheepskin, wool side in, so the oars made no more noise than a cat licking cream. The man at the oars turned his head as he passed and said, low, Evening, Doctor. Mind the bear. Then he was gone into the dark like a bad debt.

Wilkins: In the morning there was a pint jar on my wagon seat. Under it was a copper cent with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. struck across Liberty's face, one of my own stamped coins come all the way back around the county to pay me for minding my business. I have been paid in many ways, friends. That was the most elegant.

Wilkins: Here's how it worked, as I figured it later with a pencil and a cold jar. He'd set two or three dark lanterns on stakes along the shore, each one with a cord run to its shutter. He'd pull a cord and that lantern would blink. Pull another and the one across the cove would blink. The deputies chased lights while he rowed the other way. The knocking was his best trick. He'd tuck himself into a little cove behind a point and knock with a mallet, facing straight at that bare ledge. The point of land kept the deputies from hearing the knock itself, so all they heard was the echo bouncing off the granite, and naturally they took it that he was over at the ledge. He used the pond against them, the same as a dentist uses a patient's own jaw for leverage.

Wilkins: Now for the footbridge. Next morning I head home by the cart road, which fords the outlet brook below the pond. There's a plank footbridge alongside for folks on foot, and I'd let Barnaby down to walk on his chain and stretch his legs. We come to that footbridge, and Barnaby sits. He doesn't stop, mind you, he sits. Four hundred pounds of black fur planted on his haunches like a Baptist at a barn dance, a firm theological objection to the whole idea. I pull the chain. Nothing. I wave a ham bone. He looks at the ham bone, looks at the bridge, and looks at me as if I'd proposed marriage. Now, that bear will cross a rope bridge over a gorge for a ham bone. He has crossed the Suncook in March for one. This was not a bear being lazy. This was a bear being right.

Wilkins: So I stomp out on the planks myself to shame him, and the middle plank sags under me like an old mattress. I jump back quicker than a deacon from a collection plate that's come up short. I get down and look underneath. The main stringer had been sawed three-quarters through from below, fresh, with sawdust still caught in the cobwebs. Anybody my size or bigger, or anybody fat on county pay, would go straight through. Barnaby smelled that sawdust, or the man who'd made it, or the deputies who were meant to walk on it, and he wanted no part of any of it.

Wilkins: I drove the wagon through the ford, went home, and told nobody. The next afternoon Deputy Tuttle, the one who'd needed to make water, came down that path at a trot after a lantern he'd seen the night before, and he went through that footbridge like a stone through a wet newspaper. The brook mud there is black, deep, and greedy. It took him to the armpits. When they hauled him out with a rail and a rope he had more leeches on him than buttons, fat ones hanging off his neck like grapes. The brook kept his left boot as a toll, and he came up smelling like a tanner's privy in July, so ripe his own horse would not let him mount. He walked home to Gilmanton Corners leading the horse, the horse leading with its nose turned away. Barnaby has better judgment about bridges than the Belknap County commissioners, and nobody has ever had to bribe him to approve one.

Wilkins: That's my column. Now here's Gilmanton's. The neighbors will tell you Obed Crane walked on the water. I say he had a punt painted with lampblack, and between a miracle and a can of lampblack, bet on the lampblack every time. They'll tell you his lantern burned blue and never needed oil. It needed oil. I smelled it. Kerosene, too, not camphene. The man wasn't a fool. They'll tell you the loons sang to warn him. Loons sing to warn nobody. They sound like a widow who has just read the will, and they'd holler the same for a deputy as for a runner. They'll tell you Barnaby balked at that bridge because he saw the Lantern Man's ghost standing on it. The man wasn't dead yet, so the ghost would have had to come early, and a bear is a practical animal. He doesn't fear ghosts. He fears falling into cold mud, the same as any Christian. And they'll tell you the Lantern Man was never caught because he was never really there. He was there. He said good evening to me. He paid me in my own coin. That's more than most real men ever did.

♪ Banjo turnaround

Wilkins: Now, I promised you company tonight, and she's come a long way. All the way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, she's an herbalist and a historian of the old mountain talk. Miss Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins. The war's over, so I'll only roast you half as hard as I would a Virginian in sixty-two.

Clara: Well, I thank you, Doctor, and I'll only roast you half as hard as your bear does. I met him on the way in. He sniffed my satchel, my bonnet and a place no gentleman would sniff, and then he sat down like he'd judged me and found me wanting.

Wilkins: He finds everybody wanting. It's his one Christian quality. Now, Clara, we've been talking lights in the dark. Your people ran the mountains at night, and I'd wager they had tricks for light.

Clara: Oh, they did, but the best ones used no lantern at all. My granddaddy's cousin Asa ran a trail down off the ridge that nobody could follow by day, let alone by night. He'd go into the woods and find rotten oak and chestnut that glowed. Foxfire, we call it, that cold green shine that comes up out of rotting wood like the wood's dreaming. He'd chip off pieces and press them into notches he'd cut in the trees, waist high, every twenty steps. At night that trail lit up like a row of little green candles only he knew to look for. A revenue man could walk right past and see nothing but the dark.

Wilkins: That's a clever trick. Too clever, I'd say. Something went wrong with it.

Clara: A possum went wrong with it. One night a possum got curious and carried off one of those foxfire chips in its mouth, and Asa, who'd had a little something to keep the cold off, follows the light. He goes down the hill, under a fence, and straight into Uncle Jubal's hog wallow up to his knees, with a forty-pound jug on each shoulder and the possum sitting on the fence rail grinning at him.

Wilkins: A possum is the only creature in the Blue Ridge that can lead a sober man into a hog wallow, and it sounds like your kin needed no help getting there.

Clara: You hush. He kept both jugs. He came out of that wallow smelling worse than your deputy, but he kept both jugs, and the family counted it a victory.

Wilkins: As any family should. How did they signal, Clara? The Lantern Man used shutters. What did the mountain folk use?

Clara: My great-uncle Thaddeus had the churn lantern. He'd set a lit lantern down inside an old butter churn with a hole bored in the lid. That light could go only one way, straight up out of the hollow to the boy on lookout on the ridge, and never sideways to the road where the law rode. He'd put his hat over the hole and take it off. One flash meant all clear. Two meant the law's in the hollow. And three meant your supper's ready, because Aunt Delphine got hold of it once and used it to call him home.

Wilkins: A churn lantern. The only butter in Virginia that ever churned up trouble.

Clara: You'd be surprised what churns up trouble in Virginia, Doctor.

Wilkins: I would not, madam. I've been there. Give us some of the old talk now. What did your folks call a man like Obed Crane?

Clara: Well, the makers were blockaders, from running the blockade on the tax, you see. A night delivery was an owl-hoot run. A revenue man's lantern coming up the road was the law's lamp. And a careless runner who let his light show, why, he was a lightning bug, because you could see him flashing a mile off and he'd get swatted just about as easy.

Wilkins: Lightning bug. I've known some lightning bugs. Mostly I've pulled their teeth after the deputies were done with them. Now, Clara, here's a strange thing. Before you came up tonight you told me you'd heard of the Lantern Man before.

Clara: I had, and that's the strangest part of my trip. Two summers back a Yankee tin peddler came through our hollow selling pie pans and lies, and around the fire he told a tale about the Lantern Man of Loon Pond, way up in New Hampshire. In his version the Lantern Man carried a lantern in each hand and a third one clamped in his teeth, and he ran barrels across the pond on the ice in high summer.

Wilkins: In summer! Lord. And a lantern in his teeth. I'd have pulled them for him at a discount. That's what I mean about the second column, friends. The story walked six hundred miles south and grew a third lantern and a summertime ice sheet on the way.

Clara: Stories travel the same as liquor, Doctor. Every man who passes the jug takes a sip and tops it off with something of his own.

Wilkins: Truer words. Last one, Clara. You're an herb woman, and your people worked stills by lamplight. Any lessons?

Clara: One, and it's a hard one. My old Aunt Pruda had a still house in a laurel thicket. One night she broke the globe off her lantern and set it on the floor while she fixed a leak. She said the vapor came creeping along the dirt and reached for that open flame like a hungry cat after a bird. It went whump, and it took her eyebrows, her apron and half the roof shakes. She lived. Every one of us since has hung the lantern outside on a pole and let the light come in through the window. Nobody in my family sets a flame on a still-house floor, not ever.

Wilkins: That's wise, and I'll say more about it after the pitchman has had his say. Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, ladies and gentlemen. Stay by the stove, Clara. Barnaby will want to apologize. He won't, but he'll want to.

Clara: I'll keep my satchel on my lap, thank you.

♪ Brassy pitchman's fanfare on banjo and fiddle, a stomp of boots

Announcer: Friends! Neighbors! Lend me your ears and your good sense! Is your old kettle pitted, patched, leaking at the seams and sweating green like a deacon in August? Then hear me now! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper and fitted with precision machine-cut brass unions true to a hair, the Flame-Flow is built to maximize convective circulation, rolling the heat round that pot like a wagon wheel, and delivers unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures and traditional distillation demonstrations! The flagship Flame-Flow costs just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! Write it on your cuff: moonshinestill.com. The full address is https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Or come see her gleam with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, with the bear out front at no extra charge! Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com! The Flame-Flow! Pure copper and honest work!

♪ Fanfare ends with a banjo flourish

♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a copper lid set down with a soft ring

Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper, fire and the lantern problem.

Wilkins: First, the plain word, because I want no widows writing me letters. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. What I tell you tonight is history and education, the way a man might teach you how a cannon works without handing you the powder. Only a licensed distiller may lawfully make spirits to drink. Now, the craft.

Wilkins: Clara's Aunt Pruda learned the first lesson the hard way, and I'll explain the philosophy behind it. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise politely like chimney smoke. It sinks and creeps along the floor, low and invisible, and it can travel a good distance to find a flame, the way water finds the lowest place in a cellar. A lantern set on the floor of a still house sits right where that vapor goes. A lantern hung high is better. One hung outside the window is best, with the globe whole and the wick trimmed. A man who sets his lantern by the still has decided to meet his Maker ahead of schedule and wants to bring the roof along for company.

Wilkins: Second, the worm. That's your copper coil running down through a barrel of cold water, the condenser where vapor turns back to liquid. The Lantern Man's people up on the west shore ran their worm barrel off a spring brook, cold all summer. Your worm must stay cold with fresh water moving through. If you let the worm tub warm up, the vapor goes straight through the coil without turning to liquid and comes puffing out the worm's mouth as hot invisible fumes, right where you're standing with your jars. That wastes your spirit, and if a flame is near, it's a fire.

Wilkins: Third, and you must never forget it: a still must never be sealed shut and must never be allowed to block. The vapor path from the pot to the worm's mouth has to stay open to the air. If you plug the line, or let mash foam up and clog the arm, or let a careless boy cork the worm's end, the pressure builds in a hot pot with nowhere to go. A plugged worm turns your still into a cannon, and unlike a cannon, it doesn't care which way it's pointed. I knew a man in Barnstead who found that out. They found his kettle lid in a pine tree forty feet up, and they found him in the next field, and I will not tell you which parts of him they found first. That's why the fire stays low and steady and why a man stays with his still the whole run. You don't stoke her and go to supper.

Wilkins: Now, the method, told for history. You start with a wash. Up in the Lakes towns they made it as often from apples as from corn. Crush your apples to pomace, press out the juice, and let it work in a clean barrel in a warm room with plenty of air. Fermenting gives off a gas that will smother a man in a closed cellar. When the bubbling quits and the cider has gone dry and hard, that's your wash, weak as a parson's handshake. Into the copper pot it goes, two-thirds full and no more so it has room to boil, with the cap seated and the arm open to the worm, and you bring her up slow.

Wilkins: You catch the run in small jars, numbered in order, a row of them like teeth in a jaw. This is where honest men and dead men part company. The first runnings, the foreshots and heads, smell sharp, like glue or a painter's shop. Those carry methanol and the harsh stuff, and you throw them out generously. You don't drink them, you don't rub them on a sore tooth, and you don't save them for your brother-in-law, however much he deserves it. When in doubt, throw out another jar. A jar wasted is cheaper than a man blinded. Then come the hearts, clean and sweet, the part worth keeping. Then the tails, oily and dull, smelling like wet dog in a church pew. You set them aside. Each jar gets a smell and a taste on the fingertip, never a gulp, and you mark your cut where the character changes. It's tooth pulling all over again. You go slow, you watch the patient, and you stop when the root shows.

Wilkins: And the copper does its part. A bright, clean pot pulls the stink out of the vapor, so scrub her after every run and keep her shining. The Lantern Man's barrels were sweet for a reason. The men who filled them kept their copper clean, kept their cuts honest, and kept their lanterns out of the still house. Obed was the one who took the risks on the water, and they took none in the shed.

♪ Fiddle reel, a few bars, then down

♦ A second wax cylinder spun up on the machine, hiss and pop

Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang and the mail. We've had a voice come up by cylinder, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let's hear him.

Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?

♦ Cylinder hiss fades

Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro! Rabbit, I know you've asked around about this before, and every time I hear it your uncle has a fresh twig in his hand. I'll take it apart like a bad molar, root by root.

♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin

Wilkins: Root number one, the hickory ash. Wood ash with water run through it makes lye. That's potash. Our granddaddies in New Hampshire cleared their land, burned the timber, leached the ashes, boiled the lye down in big iron kettles and sold the potash to Boston for soap and glass. Half this state was paid for in ashes. Lye is a strong alkali. Put a dose in the thump keg and it may knock down a little sour vinegar smell if the wash turned, because alkali eats acid. That's all it does. It doesn't touch methanol, and it never did. It will turn the oils in the run soapy, so you end up with liquor that tastes like Monday washday. If ash fixed bad liquor, every burned-down still house in Carolina would be pouring the finest spirit in the Union.

♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin

Wilkins: Root number two, the red oak shavings. Oak in hot spirit gives up tannin, color and a woody taste. That's flavor, Rabbit, the way a barrel gives flavor, and it's no medicine at all. And red oak is a poor wood for spirit work anyhow. Its pores run open end to end, so liquid seeps right through. You can blow soap bubbles through a stick of red oak, I've done it at a fair for a nickel a look. That's why a cooper builds a tight whiskey barrel from white oak, which plugs its own pores. Your uncle's red oak leaks worse than a Wilkesboro preacher's secret. Shavings will color a bad run and make it look like an honest one. That's the trouble with them. They hide the problem. They don't remove it.

♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin

Wilkins: Root number three, the truth. The only way to get rid of bad heads is to catch them in the jar and pour them out on the ground. The thump keg strengthens a run, and that's all it does. Cuts are what clean it. Rabbit, tell your uncle he can keep his hickory ashes for the soap kettle and his red oak for kindling, and pour out his foreshots like a man.

Wilkins: While I have the punch in hand, let's kill a myth that's done real harm. Folks say light a spoonful, and if it burns blue it's safe. Friends, methanol and good ethanol both burn with a pale blue flame you can barely see in daylight. That flame can't tell poison from spirit. Lighting liquor to test it for poison is like sniffing a rattlesnake to see if it's venomous. You'll get an answer, but not one you can use.

♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, then the coin skitters off the anvil and pings onto the floor

Wilkins: There goes another Liberty under the woodbox. And while I'm at it: shaking the jar and reading the bead gives you a rough guess at strength and nothing more. Cold, sugar or a little oil will fool it. The bead on a shaken jar lies more often than a horse trader on a Sunday. If you want strength, use a hydrometer. If you want safety, make your cuts. No bead, no flame and no hickory ash will save you from a cut you never made.

Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, thank you for the cylinder. Give your uncle my regards and tell him I'd like to buy his ashes. I'm short on soap, and Barnaby is long on smell.

Clara: Doctor, tell Rabbit my granny swore by a sprig of sassafras in the keg.

Wilkins: And did it clean the heads, Clara?

Clara: No, sir. It made the heads smell like root beer, and Uncle Thaddeus went blind in one eye for a week. After that she stuck to making cuts.

Wilkins: There you have it, friends, out of the mountains and onto the anvil. Make your cuts.

♪ Quick bright banjo sting

Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge electrolytic copper as bright as a new cent! See her at moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield. That's moonshinestill.com!

♪ Sting fades into the slow theme

♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the stove door creaking shut

Wilkins: SIGN-OFF. Well, friends, the lamp is low and so is the jar. Obed Crane quit the water a few years later. Some say he moved to the West and some say he drowned. I say the last time I saw him he was buying a new pair of boots in Laconia and paid in cash, so that's my column. Gilmanton still swears his lantern blinks on Loon Pond on foggy nights. Maybe it does. If you see it, don't follow it, and for God's sake don't cross any footbridge my bear won't.

Wilkins: My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge for her foxfire, her churn lantern and her low opinion of my bear, which I share.

Clara: It was a pleasure, Doctor. Tell Barnaby I forgive him for the satchel.

Wilkins: He doesn't want your forgiveness, madam. He wants your satchel. Now, if you'd like to learn this craft the right way, the history of it, the copper, the fire and the honest cut, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn it at my anvil and my pot, the lawful way, with all your fingers and both eyebrows still on at graduation. Ask at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, here on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or send word through moonshinestill.com. The Lantern Man could hide a light, a punt and forty barrels from three deputies. I can't hide a single jar from Barnaby. Pray for me.

Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.

♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar

♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades under wax cylinder crackle

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