The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,76

counter and we watched together. Everybody else had left to join the crowd across the road.

“I been afraid of this,” Murph said. “There’s a lot of mutterin’ already.”

The girls had been dancing awful tired, as if they couldn’t hardly pick up their feet any more. Then the music stopped and they staggered down the steps and into the tent. The man started over to take hold of the microphone. And then the sheriff climbed up on stage. The man started to wave him off, but the sheriff said something we couldn’t hear, and showed the man something he took out of his pocket. The man scratched his head and looked like he didn’t know what to do, but then backed away and let the sheriff have the microphone.

Now that he was over in front of it you could hear him, because it was coming out of the loudspeakers. “Men,” he says, “I got an announcement to make.”

Men in the crowd started to whistle and yell.

“Get down, you old fossil!”

“Who the hell wants to look at you?”

“Bring back them luscious peaches.”

“Throw the old bastard out! We want girls.”

The sheriff held up his hands and kept talking, trying to drown them out. “Men, you’re bein’ made suckers of. You been gypped. Choo-Choo Caroline ain’t down in that bottom. You ought to know that by now.”

“Throw him out,” somebody yelled. “We want girls.”

“Shut up!” somebody else shouted. “Let him talk.”

“Yeah, he may be right.”

“How about that?”

The sheriff went on, “There’s been eight thousand of you, or maybe more, tramplin’ over that bottom for ten hours. There ain’t a square yard of it that ain’t been walked on. If she’s down there, how come you haven’t found her?”

“I think he’s got something there,” one of the men called out.

“You’re damn right he has.”

The sheriff held up his hands again. “All right. Let me talk. You ain’t heard the half of it yet. There ain’t no reward offered for that girl, and never has been. You’re a bunch of suckers.”

Then Pop was climbing up on the stand.

“He’d better look out,” Murph says, real soft.

Pop was holding up his hands, and talking, but you couldn’t hear a word he was saying because the sheriff was drowning him out with the loudspeakers. Then a rock flew through the air, and it just missed Pop’s head.

“We’ll see who’s a sucker!” a man yelled in the crowd.

Another rock went sailing past Pop.

“Murder!” Murph whispered. “Me for the timber.” He looked like he was ready to start running.

But just then there was a big commotion at the back of the crowd, on the downhill side, towards the house. A man was running this way, yelling at the top of his voice and waving something over his head. He broke into the crowd and started shoving his way through like a crazy man. When he got to the front he jumped up on the stage, still waving this thing over his head. Pop looked at it.

Then he jumped and grabbed it out of the man’s hand and leaped for the microphone. The sheriff just stared, with his mouth open.

“It’s the G-string!” Pop yelled into the microphone. He held it up so everybody could see it. “The diamond G-string Choo-Choo was wearin’!”

The crowd let out a roar.

Pop grabbed the man by the arm and dragged him in front of the microphone. They jostled the poor sheriff right out of the way.

“Where’d you find it?” Pop asked. “Tell us where you found this thing! Did you see her? Where is she?”

The man shook his head. He was all out of breath. Then I took a good look at him, and I saw it was Harm, the one Uncle Sagamore had talked to a while ago. He gasped for breath, and then he says, “Right—down below the lake—about half a mile. It was caught—on a bush.”

The crowd roared again.

Pop held up his hands. “There you are, men! She ain’t down there, is she? That pore, lost, terrified girl! And now she ain’t got a single stitch on!”

I looked down at Murph. He was leaning on the counter with his face down on his arms. When he straightened up he shook his head with a sort of dazed look in his eyes.

“Kid,” he says, “when you grow up, just remember it was Murph that told you first.”

“Told me what?” I asked.

“That he’s a genius. The only real, live genius I ever saw.”

The crowd was beginning to drown Pop out now. “We’ll find her,” they was