sandals. They whined a little and looked real interested. Then the sheriff put the sandals inside his shirt and let the dogs over close to where we had laid in the ferns. They whined some more and pulled hard to get over to it. They went snuff! snuff! snuff! with their noses close to the ground, and when the sheriff and the deputy unstrapped the leashes they went swarming all over the gully, eager and excited as anything, and then one of them let out this big booming bark and started down the hill swinging back and forth with his nose close to the ground and his ears flapping. The others followed him.
“They got it!” the sheriff yelled. “They got the scent.”
They disappeared downhill in the trees. We could hear their baying and tell which way they was going, so we ran along after them. The sheriff was pretty lame from that long walk out from town, so he had a hard time keeping up. In a minute we caught sight of them again, crossing a little open space. Four other men was chasing after them then. They was pointing and yelling.
“Hey, Joe,” one of them shouted. “Come on. Them dawgs is on the trail. They’ll lead us to her.”
Two more men came charging out of the bushes and took out after the rest. More kept coming. Every time we’d catch sight of the dogs there’d be a bigger crowd after them. We began to drop behind, but we could tell by the trampling and crashing through the brush ahead that there was a whole army of them up ahead of us trying to keep up with the dogs. The uproar got further and further away, going down towards the bottom.
The sheriff had to stop and rest. He sat down on a stump and pulled out the big red handkerchief to mop his face. He sighed and shook his head. “You just don’t know what it can do to you,” he says to the deputy, real bitter and discouraged. “I mean, waking up in the dead of night with the cold sweat on you, wondering what the hell he’ll do next. And the awful part of it is even after you’ve found out, you ain’t going to be able to pin it on him. All you can do is go around and sort of pick up the pieces. He ain’t done a lick of work in forty years that I know of; he’s got plenty of time to plan these things so he’s two moves ahead of you all the time.
“Now you take this one. He knows perfectly well I can’t order that carnival out of here—even if it could get out, which it can’t because the road’s clogged with abandoned cars—which he also knew would happen. He knows I can’t order it out and break up this thing because it’s got a permit to operate in this county. So while the whole damn state’s in a uproar over a naked cooch dancer that probably ain’t even down here, he’s drawin’ a fat rake-off from the hamburgers and dancing girls and wheels-of-fortune and the floozies, beside selling moonshine to ‘em at New York prices and charging them a dollar to park their cars into a solid snarl.
“And now, you mark my words, before it’s over there’ll be something else, too—like maybe a big mudhole suddenly developing in the road and when they do get the road clear everybody will get stuck and have to be pulled out at two dollars a head.”
“Sheriff,” I says, “you mean you still don’t think Miss Caroline was with me?”
He took off his hat and mopped his head again. “I don’t really know what I think any more, Billy,” he says. “I do believe you’re telling the truth, in spite of your handicap of being a member of the Noonan family. I believe she was with you, but where she is now I wouldn’t even try to guess. Do you hear them dawgs?”
“Yes,” I says. “Sounds like they’re pretty far over there.”
He nodded. “They’re about two miles away, and still going across the bottom. That girl was barefooted, and she couldn’t have walked three hundred yards, but before the day’s over you’re going to find out the dawgs has followed her trail somewhere around eighteen to twenty miles, back and forth across this bottom. There’ll be three or four thousand men following ‘em, and every time they double back up past the carnival a fresh