They was going to draft Pop and Uncle Sagamore, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. They started pushing through the crowd, with the sheriff and the man named Pearl holding them by the arms. I followed along behind with all the people pushing around me as we went up the steps into the courthouse. We climbed up some more steps to the second floor and into a big room that had Sheriff wrote on a sign nailed to the door. Two girls was writing on typewriters at some desks, and there was a lot of steel cabinets with drawers in ‘em. People come crowding in behind us till the whole room was full.
Booger put the box down on the desk where one of his girls was writing. Him and Pearl and Otis and the sheriff crowded round. “Stand back a little, folks,” the sheriff was yelling. “Give us a little room here. We got to photograph the evidence once more.”
Some of the people pushed back till they cleared a little space around his desk. Pearl motioned for Pop and Uncle Sagamore to move back towards the corner of the room. I stood close to Pop because I was still scared. There must have been twenty, thirty people in the room, all grinning, and the door was packed solid so no more could get in or out.
The photographer got his camera ready. Now,” the sheriff says. “I want one shot of me opening a jar of the evidence.” He stopped then and thought about it. “No, by golly,” he goes on, “these two smart deputy sheriffs of mine was the ones outfoxed the old devil and caught him, so we’ll all three have our picture made with a jar of it.”
Otis and Booger just grinned like big chessie cats. They reached in the box and each got a jar.
“Shurf,” Uncle Sagamore says, “I keep tryin’ to tell you you’re makin’ a mistake.
“Shut up, Sagamore Noonan,” the sheriff says. “We don’t want to hear no more out of you.”
Uncle Sagamore scratched his leg with his big toe and looked down at the floor. “Shucks,” he says, kind of tired and put out, “all this hooraw over just a little dab of tannery solution.” People just snorted at him and looked back at the sheriff.
The sheriff held up his jar and looked through. He grinned. “Sure is a purty color ain’t she?”
Booger sat down on the corner of the desk and held his out in his hand, looking important. “I don’t never drink nothing but Old Sagamore Tannery Solution,” he says.
Everybody laughed. The photographer’s flashlight went off, and all three of them started trying to twist the jars open. That glue had set, so I wondered if the caps would come off at all. They caught the bottom of the jar in one hand and the cap in the other and twisted till they made faces. Uncle Sagamore and Pop leaned back against the wall and watched, real interested.
All of a sudden the sheriff’s jar just came right apart in his hands as clean as a whistle. The tannery juice went every which way, all over his clothes and the papers on the desk, and on the people standing around. It ran down his pants legs into his shoes. And before anybody could yell or jump or anything, Booger’s jar did the same thing. It was just like they had been sawed in two, and it was right where Pop and Uncle Sagamore had tested them with that string. Otis’s jar didn’t break, but when he jumped back he dropped it and it broke all to pieces on the floor.
It was a regular madhouse. That awful smell hit everybody at the same time and they started to choke and sputter and run for the door, but there was so many standing in it and in the hall outside they couldn’t get through. They piled up like water piling up behind a dam. Everybody was yelling and pushing. Then the smell started to flow out through the door and people in the hall yelled and began running down the stairs. In a minute the log jam in the door broke and they all shot through at once.
Everybody, that is, but the sheriff. And of course me and Pop and Uncle Sagamore. The sheriff just stood there with his feet in a puddle of tannery juice. Papers was all over the floor, soaking up the juice, where somebody had knocked over one