The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,59

sat down on the top step close to my feet. The lamp was still burning in the front room, and I could see it was the sheriff out there.

“Billy, you asleep?” he asked.

“No,” I says. “Have you found her yet?”

He took off his hat and mopped his head, and slumped down a little like he was real tired. “Not a sign of her. God, I’m wore out. Feel like I’d walked a hundred miles through that brush.”

“Is everybody still looking?” I asked.

“Everybody except me an’ Otis. We’re goin’ back to town to get a few hours sleep an’ bring out a fresh party to relieve these around ten this morning. It’s three-thirty now, an’ it looks like we ain’t goin’ to find her as soon as I thought.”

“Sure funny you ain’t,” I says. “But then, Uncle Sagamore says that’s a awful big bottom down there.”

“It sure as hell is funny,” he says. “Don’t make no difference how big the place is. She couldn’t of gone very far barefooted. When her feet got sore she’d sit and stay where she was.”

“It seems like it to me, too,” I says.

“Billy,” he says. “I want to ask you something, and I want you to tell me the truth. Was that girl really with you when you ran off down there? When they shot at you, I mean?”

“Of course she was,” I said. I sat up in bed.

“Are you sure she didn’t get—uh—shot, there in the water? And you got scared and didn’t want to tell anybody?”

“No. What would I want to tell a story about it for? Heck, she was the one pulled me out of the water.”

I told him the whole thing, how Miss Harrington had towed me along until we got under the bushes, and how we’d run off down the hill and hid in the ferns.

He shook his head. “Well, I reckon it must be true. But I’ll be damned if I can see how she got so far away twenty men can’t find her.”

“I don’t understand it, either,” I says.

“Well, when I get back in the morning, will you go with me and see if you can point out this place where you hid in the ferns?”

“Sure,” I says. “We can go now, if you want to.”

“No, we’ll wait for daylight,” he says. He sighed and kind of stretched out a little. “I couldn’t walk that far, nohow. I’m pooped. Say, where’s Sagamore?”

“He’s down in the bottom, looking for her. He went off that way on his mule.”

“Hmmmmph,” the sheriff says. “That don’t sound like him a bit. You mean he’s actually goin’ to do something useful, after fifty years?”

Just then Otis come around the corner of the house, and him and the sheriff went on up and got in their car. They drove off. The sound truck started another record.

In about half an hour I heard Uncle Sagamore’s truck start up, down there by the barn. It went up the hill towards the wire gate. I wondered where he was going this time of night. After a while I heard the motor racing like he was stuck in the sand. That went on for five or ten minutes, and then it stopped. Pretty soon he came back, walking.

He came up on the steps. “What happened to the truck?” I asked.

“Oh,” he says. “I got stuck in the sand. Dag-gone truck just bogged down like a heifer in a mudhole.”

“That’s too bad,” I says. “You didn’t see any sign of Miss Harrington down in the bottom?”

“Not a trace. But I reckon they’ll find her, come daylight.”

He went on down towards the barn, and after a while I went to sleep. I didn’t wake up again till it was broad daylight, and it was beginning. I never saw anything like it in my life.

* * *

Even before I opened my eyes I knew they had brought the tubs back. The smell was in my nose before I was full awake, and Sig Freed was sniffing and whimpering about it beside me on the bedroll. When he saw me open my eyes he licked me on the face. The sound truck had stopped making noise, but I could see it still sitting up there, about fifty yards away from the house. I rolled over the other way, to see if Pop was there. His bedroll had been slept in but he was gone. I didn’t hear any sounds in the house, though, like they was cooking breakfast. Our car was parked