He kept trying to talk, but it was mainly just sputter, like steam pushing up the lid of a coffee pot. “Sagamore Noonan!” he yells, “I—I—”
Uncle Sagamore didn’t even seem to hear him. He just shifted his tobacco over on the other side and shook his head sort of sad. “Politics is hard on a man, Sam,” he says. “It always puts me in mind of Bessie’s cousin, Peebles. Peebles was a dep’ty shurf for a long time, till he begin to grow this here sort of mildew on his hunkers. Just regular mildew, like you see on a pone of bread that’s gone stale. It was a real puzzling thing, and they couldn’t figure it out at all.
“Well sir, it went on like that for quite a spell, with Peebles goin’ to the doctor every week or so to have this mildew scraped off his butt, but they never could figure out what caused it, till one day the doctor happened to be goin’ by the courthouse durin’ office hours an’ he’d seen what it was. Seems like they’d put in one of them new-fangled sprinklin’ systems on the lawn, and the edge of one of the sprays, by golly, reached over just to the edge of Peebles’s settin’ place on the step. Well, they got to inquirin’ around, and found out that Peebles had been home sick the day they’d put in the sprinkler and tried it out, and they’d forgot to allow for him. So he’d been settin’ there all these months with his tail in that spray of water.”
The sheriff seemed to get hold of hisself at last. His face was still purple, but he got real quiet. He reached down for his handkerchief and mopped his face sort of slow and deliberate; then he took a deep breath and put the handkerchief in his pocket and walked over in front of Uncle Sagamore like a man that was holding onto hisself real hard to keep from blowing up like a stick of dynamite. He began talking.
“Sagamore Noonan,” he says, real quiet, but still taking those deep breaths, “when the voters elected me sheriff for the first time ten years ago I promised ‘em I was going to make this county a decent place to live by puttin’ you so far back in the pen it’d cost you eight dollars to send a postcard out to the front gate. When they re-elected me six years ago, and then again two years ago, I promised ‘em the same thing. They knew I was honestly tryin’, and they believed me. They had patience, because they knew what I was up against.
“I’m still tryin’. And some day I’m going to do it. Some day I’m going to get enough evidence on you to send you up the river so far your grandchildren will be old men when you get back, and we can hold up our heads around here and look the rest of the state in the face.
“Sometimes I’m tempted to quit, to just throw up the job and sell my home and go somewhere else and start over, but then I get to thinkin’ about all the other poor people in this county who’d have to stay here and go on putting up with you because they can’t sell out and leave, so I stick it out and keep trying. It’s an obligation, I reckon. I just can’t abandon all these defenseless people to you.
“It ain’t just a job. It’s gone beyond that. I went into the Treasurer’s office the other day and told ‘em they didn’t have to issue my pay-checks any more till I freed the county of you, and that if the people didn’t re-elect me two years from this fall I’d go on servin’ for nothing, right along with the new sheriff, till we got the evidence on you to put you away and we wouldn’t be ashamed to bring innocent children into a world where you was running around loose.
“And now that I find out there ain’t only you, that there’s two of you here on this one farm with decent, God-fearin’ people livin’ all around you, I’m almost tempted to call the Governor and have him declare martial law. There must be something on the statute books to protect the citizens from you without havin’ to go to court with evidence of any one particular crime.”
“It’s like I was tellin’ you, Sam,” Uncle Sagamore says. “This shurf is a real fine