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.I mean Miss Caroline.She didn’t have anything on but her diamonds, but this time there was three patches of them.She was posed in front of a great big fan or something that looked like it was made out of ostrich feathers.And it seemed like the whole first page of the paper was about her.The headline said:SOUGHT IN WILDS.SCANTILY CLAD DANCEROBJECT OF FRENZIED SEARCHI tried to read what it said, but the way the sheriff was waving it around and slapping it with his other hand I couldn’t get any more than snatches of it.“.most fantastic manhunt in history.Wild confusion.Stampede fanned by rumors of reward.The already fabulous Choo-Choo Caroline, beautiful missing witness in gangland murder case.sweetheart of late gang leader.alleged to have fled almost nude into swamp.”I didn’t know what a lot of the big words meant, but it sure looked as if everybody was interested in her.Uncle Sagamore took the paper out of the sheriff’s hand and studied it.“Well sir,” he says, “that there’s a right nice picture of her, ain’t it, Shurf?”The sheriff took another deep breath.He rubbed both hands up over his face and then down again, and this time the log jam of words inside him got straightened out and he began talking.It wasn’t loud, or anything.He talked real calm and low, like a man that was trying to hold his breath at the same time he was saying words.It was more like a whisper.“Sagamore Noonan,” he says, “if there was any way the moral law would let me, I’d pull a gun right here an’ kill you.I’d shoot you, an’ then I’d go running up the road laughing like a hyena, an’ they’d let me go.They wouldn’t do a thing to me.At the very worse they’d just lace me up in a straitjacket or put me in a padded cell, an’ I’d have all the rest of my life with nothing to do but just stand there with my head stuck out through the bars and laugh about never being the sheriff again of a county that had you in it.”“Listen,” he says, still whispering.“They got all the highway patrol cars in this end of the state out there on that road south of town, tryin’ to untangle the snarl.It’ll be two o’clock this afternoon before they can get any traffic across it.That’s just the highway.From here out to the highway, there’s four solid miles of abandoned cars jammed bumper to bumper in the road.They just got out and left ‘em, and took the keys.You can’t get round ‘em, and you can’t move ‘em without a wrecker—or twenty wreckers.And we can’t even get the wreckers to ‘em until they get that highway open.“I walked in here from two miles this side of town.That’s the only way you can get in here, or out.The woods is swarming with newspaper reporters and photographers and radio news people that tried to make it on foot and got lost.”He took another deep breath, and went on, “There’s whole towns as far as fifty miles from here that ain’t got a man left in ‘em.The stores are closed.The buses have stopped running.Construction jobs are deserted.Whole communities is empty except for women and the women is raving.I got relays of girls answering the phone, tryin’ to tell people there ain’t been any reward offered for that girl.Ain’t none of ‘em been able to stick it out more’n two hours.They can’t stand the language.“And now that you’ve turned this place into a honky tonk, I never will get ‘em out of here until we find that there girl and show ‘em she’s been found.They wouldn’t leave, even if they could get there cars out.”Uncle Sagamore pursed his lips like he was going to spit, only he didn’t, and he rubbed his chin real thoughtful.“Well, Shurf,” he says.“That’s what we’re all tryin’ to do, find that there girl.Why don’t we just all pitch in together an’ look for her? We been waitin’ all day for you to get down here on the job an’ do somethin’ about tryin’ to locate her.”“You—you—” the sheriff says.He was beginning to fizz and sputter again.“Why, shucks,” Uncle Sagamore went on.“I don’t see nothin’ for us to do, but keep on looking.You got lots of help.An’ it don’t seem to me like you’d want to start raisin’ no stink about the reward.You want to have all them people goin’ around sayin’ mebbe that shurf don’t even care whether that there girl’s found or not? Why, they might get real violent.”The sheriff lunged out and caught the leashes of the other three hounds.“Give me them dogs,” he snarled at the man.“Let’s go.” Then he looked around at me.“Billy, you come along and show us where you hid in them ferns.”The dogs barked.They had a real deep, rumbling sort of bark.They lunged on the leashes and almost pulled the sheriff off his feet again.“Damn it—” he says.And just then there was another voice behind us.We whirled around and Baby Collins was standing in the door of the trailer, leaning against the door frame with a cigarette in her hand.She was wearing a wrap-around sort of thing made out of some lacy black stuff you could see right through, with one bare leg slanting a little out of the front of it.“Hi, honey,” she says to the sheriff.“Why don’t you tie up your dogs and come in out of the sun? We’ll open a box of cornflakes.”SixteenThe sheriff got a little darker red in the face, and Uncle Sagamore says to Baby Collins, “I’d like to make you acquainted with the shurf.He’s a real busy man, though.”“Oh,” she says.“That’s too bad.But I’m glad to meet you, sheriff.Drop in and see us any time you’re out this way, and bring your scrabble board.”She smiled at all of us and went back to the trailer.The big hounds was lunging on the leashes again, about to pull the sheriff over, and there was so much uproar when he finally was able to talk again you couldn’t tell whether it was Uncle Sagamore he was cussing or the dogs.Sig Freed got mixed up in it too.He’d bark at the hounds and then run around in a circle and jump up on me, just to be sure I was still there to back him up in case they got mad.Any one of ‘em could have swallowed him with one bite.We started off down past the house, but all of a sudden the sheriff stopped.“Oh, hell,” he says.“We got to have something of hers for the dawgs to get the scent.”“That’s right,” the other man says.It was the first time he’d even opened his mouth.I guess he was a new deputy.He was a kind of sandy-haired man with a long neck and weak blue eyes.The sheriff waved an arm.“Run up there to that trailer they was livin’ in and see if you can find a pair of her shoes, or some clothes.The trailer’s off there somewhere in that mess of cars.”“Hey wait,” I says.“I just remember Uncle Sagamore had had some clothes of hers last night [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]