Once, the heroes of the Noble Rogue cycle, Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, who, according to Peters, “each dollar in his hand ... perceived as a personal insult if he could not perceive it as a booty,” returned from Mexico after another successful scam and stopped in a Texas settlement called Bird City, spread out on the banks of the Rio Grande.
Rains begin, and the entire male population of the town begins to ply along the triangle between the three local saloons. During a small gap, friends go for a walk and notice that the old dam is about to collapse under the pressure of water and the town will turn into an island. Andy Tucker has a brilliant idea. Without wasting time, they acquire all three saloons. Rains begin again, the dam breaks, and the town is cut off for some time from the outside world. Residents of the town again begin to reach out to the saloons, but they will be surprised. Two of them are closed, and only the Blue Snake works. But the prices in this monopoly bar are fabulous, and the cops, bribed by the promise of free booze, follow the order. Nothing to do, and local drinkers have to shell out. According to the calculations of friends-swindlers, the water will not fall off earlier than a couple of weeks, and during this time they will work fine.
Everything goes like clockwork, but Andy Tucker cannot deny himself the pleasure of having a drink. He warns Jeff Peters that when drunk he becomes extremely eloquent and tries to show this in practice. But Peters doesn’t like it, and he asks his friend to leave and look for listeners elsewhere.
Andy leaves and begins to oratory at the nearest intersection. A large crowd is gathering, which is going somewhere behind the speaker. Time passes, but no one appears in the bar. In the evening, two Mexicans deliver the drunk Tucker, who is unable to explain what happened, to the “Blue Snake”. After sending his friend to bed and closing the cash desk, Peters sets out to find out why the local population has lost interest in alcohol. It turns out that his friend Tucker, in a fit of drunken eloquence, made a two-hour speech, more magnificent than which the inhabitants of the Bird City have never heard. He talked about the dangers of drinking so convincingly that in the end his listeners signed a paper where they solemnly promised not to take a drop of alcohol in their mouths for a year.
