The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,36
to the other one, he might even leave. We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?”
He looked at the wad of money he was still holding in his hand, and Pop looked at it. Uncle Sagamore shoved it in his pocket.
“I reckon you’re right,” Pop says. “Sure wouldn’t want to drive away a good customer with triflin’ little worries like that. He looks like a dude that could take care of hisself, anyway.”
“Sure,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Ain’t no call for us to put in our oar, Sam. Way I look at it, he want any advice from us he’d of asked us. And he said them fellers was just huntin’ rabbits, didn’t he?”
“Sure,” Pop says. He got up off the log. “Well I reckon I ort to get a couple of shovels.”
Uncle Sagamore shook his head, “Ain’t no use makin’ hard work out of a simple job like this. We’ll just bring the truck in here after dark, and hold the services over at the old Hawkins place. Ain’t nobody lived in that old tenant house for five years, an’ the well’s dry and about to cave in, anyway.”
They started back towards the house, and as soon as they was out of sight I skinned out too, circling up the side of the hill to pass them before they got home. I came out of the trees near the trailer, and Dr Severance and Miss Harrington was just getting in their car.
I waved at her. I was just about to ask her if she still wanted to go swimming, and then I remembered that what with the accident to the two rabbit hunters likely everybody was feeling pretty bad and she wouldn’t want to go.
She waved back, but she looked kind of pale. Dr Severance didn’t say anything. He just shot the car ahead with the tires spinning. He looked real mad.
I went on over to the house and played with Sig Freed on the front porch, and in a few minutes Pop and Uncle Sagamore come along.
Of course I didn’t let on I’d been down there.
“Miss Harrington’s all right,” I says to Pop.
“Well, that’s good,” he says.
“I seen her drive off in the car with Dr Severance.”
Pop and Uncle Sagamore looked at each other, and Pop took another cigar out and lit it. “I been meaning to tell you,” he says, “I think you better quit hangin’ around so much with Miss Harrington. That anemia might be catching.”
“Aw, Pop,” I says. “I like her. And besides, she’s teaching me how to swim.”
“Well, you just mind what I tell you,” Pop tells me. Him and Uncle Sagamore went on around the house. I got to thinking about it and in a few minutes I went around to the back yard myself to ask him if it wasn’t all right to go swimming with her now that she didn’t have to hold me up any more. I couldn’t catch anemia if she wasn’t touching me, could I? But they wasn’t back there. I went down to the barn, but they wasn’t down there either.
Well, I thought, maybe they went off in the woods beyond the cornfield for something. Then I remembered about that warm place in the lake that I was going to ask Uncle Sagamore about, so I went down there and took my clothes off and waded out to look for it again.
And, by golly, it was gone too. I just couldn’t find it anywhere. I’d marked right where it was, too. You lined up the back end of Finley’s ark with the corner of the front porch and waded out about eight steps till the water was up to your hips and there it was. Only it wasn’t. Now the water was just the same there as it was anywhere else. It sure was funny. I went out on the bank and thought about it while I waited for myself to dry off, but it just didn’t make any sense at all. Only thing it could be, I thought, is a kind of warm spring that don’t run all the time.
It was close on to sundown, and I went back up to the house. Pop and Uncle Sagamore had come back from wherever they had went. Pop was slicing baloney and Uncle Sagamore was frying it. They was both kind of quiet and didn’t look like they would take much to the idea of answering questions, so I didn’t ask any.