The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,66

and that he wanted me to show him where we’d hid in the ferns. It was funny he hadn’t come, I thought. Everybody else in this end of the state must be down there trying to find her, and he hadn’t even come back. I called Sig Freed and we went down that way, skirting along the lower side of the lake. Once we got out in the timber it was just crawling with men. They was running ever which way and yelling to each other to ask if she’d been found yet. Some of them was sitting down on logs, like they was tired out already, and a few was drifting up towards the house.

It just didn’t seem to make any sense, I thought. If the whole bottom was as full of men as this hillside was, they would have found a lost marble by this time. It worried me, because the only way I could figure it was that something had happened to her. Otherwise she would have heard the racket and yelled at one of the men where she was, even if she couldn’t walk any more.

It must have been nearly noon when I got back to the house. There was quite a few of the searchers up there by that time. They was up the hill from the house, mostly, on account of the smell from the tubs. Uncle Sagamore and pop was walking around, talking to them. I asked him for a dollar to buy a hamburger.

“Murph will give you one,” he says. “Just go on up and ask him.”

I went up to the stand. There was a big crowd of men around it now. They was complaining about the prices, but they was buying hamburgers. Everybody was asking whether she had been found or not. Murph and the two other men was telling them no, and making hamburgers as fast as they could. I finally squeezed through to get to the counter. Murph saw me after a while and give me a hamburger and a bottle of coke. I went across the road to see how the carnival was coming along.

There was a lot of men there too. The place was beginning to swarm with the ones coming back from the bottom. I pushed through the crowd and I could see there was five tents altogether, but there still wasn’t any rides. No Ferris wheel or merry-go-round, or anything. There was this big tent in the middle, the one that had the sort of stage out in front and the sign that said, “Girls! Girls! Girls!” The others was a shooting gallery and a toss-the-hoop, and a couple of wheels of fortune.

I was just about to go look for Pop and see if he’d give me some money for the shooting gallery, when a man got up on the stage. There was a microphone on a stand in the middle of it, and he walked over to it and whistled. The big loudspeakers on both sides of the stage went, Wheet! Wheet! Then five girls come out of the doorway of the tent and up the steps of the stage. They lined up behind the man. They was real pretty, and didn’t have hardly anything on in the way of clothes.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the man with the microphone started to say, but there was so much racket he had to stop.

Everybody around me was yelling. Some of ‘em was shouting, “Hooray! Bring on the girls!” and “Shut up and let ‘em dance!” But some more was yelling, “Hey, what the hell is this? What about Choo-Choo?”

“The whole thing looks like a fake,” another man yelled.

“I bet she ain’t even been here,” somebody else says.

The uproar was getting real bad now. And then suddenly Pop was up on the stage beside the man with the microphone. He eased the man out of the way and started talking.

“Men,” he says, “I been asked to make an announcement. I’m Sam Noonan, an’ it was my little boy Billy that was with Miss Caroline when them gangsters attacked her. She saved his life, men.”

They kept yelling.

“The hell with that.”

“Where is she now? How come we can’t find her?”

“What kind of sellout is this, anyway?”

“It’s a racket.”

“Get outta the way, you jerk, so we can see the girls.”

“Shut up and let him talk. Maybe we’ll find something out.”

Pop held up his hands for them to be quiet. “Just listen for a minute and I can answer all your questions.