The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,73

bunch of tired ones will drop off the rest and pay a dollar to watch the belly dancers, and eat hamburgers that’ll get smaller and smaller and have more and more oatmeal in them and will be selling for a dollar and a half by sundown. I been through all this before. Not this particular one, mind you, but with the same Sagamore Noonan touches.”

I kind of liked the sheriff, but it seemed to me like he was too excitable and he did too much griping about Uncle Sagamore. I couldn’t see anything wrong with him trying to get as many people as he could down here to look for Miss Caroline. I was worried about her, and I didn’t think we ought to be just sitting here when she still hadn’t been found.

“Hadn’t we better start after the dogs again?” I says. “They’re still barking like they’re on the trail, and they’ll have to catch up with her sooner or later.”

“You don’t have to follow bloodhounds that close,” he says. “You just listen to see which way they’re going. I think they’re beginning to swing now, so they’ll be back up this way before long. My guess is they’ll go through the edge of that cornfield up there behind the house.”

Well, we waited. And sure enough, it wasn’t but about half an hour before we could hear them and the whole army of men that was following them go crashing through the underbrush and timber about a furlong off to the right of us. We went over there just in time to get a glimpse of the dogs, and then we was running along in a swarm of men. The dogs went up the hill and then, by golly, it was just like the sheriff had said. They cut along the edge of the cornfield, down back of the barn, and then headed out across the bottom again.

The sheriff looked furious, but him and the deputy started back down that way. Several hundred of the men didn’t, though. They broke away and started up through the cars in the cornfield, headed for the carnival and the hot-dog stand. I was hungry too, so I called Sig Freed and we went along behind them.

There was a terrific crowd up by the stand now, and you couldn’t hardly get near the carnival. The loudspeakers was blaring and the five girls was dancing on the stage. All the other tents had big swarms around them too. Everywhere you looked there was men.

Murph and his two men was so tired they could hardly move. Murph handed me a hamburger when I finally got up close to the counter. Sure enough, the meat in it was a lot smaller than the one I’d got at noon.

“That ‘ll-be-one-dollar-fifty-no-they-haven’t-found-her,” he says.

“Pop’ll pay you,” I told him.

He looked at me. “Oh,” he says. “I’m getting punchy, kid. I didn’t even recognize you.”

I didn’t see Pop and Uncle Sagamore anywhere, but there was so many men around it would be hard to see them. I tried to watch the girls dancing, but everywhere I stood there was a bunch of tall men in front of me craning to see, theirselves, and anyway they went back inside the tent in a few minutes and the people started buying tickets for the inside show. I tried to get one too, and told the man Pop would pay him.

“Kid,” he says, “come back in fifteen years with a dollar, and I’ll let you in. It’s a promise.” He looked tired too, and his voice was hoarse.

I started to turn away, and then he tossed me fifty cents. “Here, kid,” he says. “Go over to the shooting gallery and shoot a round.”

I finally managed to squeeze my way in there, and I shot fifty cents worth at the little targets travelling across the back of the gallery on a moving belt. I didn’t hit much. When the money was gone I started looking for Pop and Uncle Sagamore. They didn’t seem to be up here anywhere, so I went down to the house. The smell from the tubs hit me in the front yard, as bad as ever, or worse, and that reminded me we never had bottled up any more of the juice to send to the government to have analyzed. Well, maybe, we’d get around to it when Miss Caroline was found and all this uproar died down.

That made me wonder if we would find her. There just wasn’t any