use kidding ourselves any longer; she had been lost nearly twenty-four hours now, and it looked more and more all the time like something bad had happened to her. Maybe that last gangster had shot her and put her body in one of the sloughs down there. That made me feel sick, and I was about ready to cry when I went in the house.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore was there in the front bedroom with the door closed, counting another bunch of money out of a flour sack. It was all over the bed.
“They haven’t found her yet, Pop,” I says.
He nodded. “I know. But they will; you just wait. Hell they can’t help it—look at how many of them is looking.”
“I know. Something must have happened to her.”
He slapped me on the back. “No sir, you just buck up. I got a feeling Miss Caroline’s perfectly all right.”
Uncle Sagamore took the sack of money after it was all counted and went out with it somewhere. When he came back we went out on the front porch. We could see Uncle Finley down there on top of the ark, hammering away to beat the band.
“He must figure the rain’s already started,” Pop says. “All these cars showing up around here.”
“I reckon so,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Oh. There’s Harm. I got to talk to him a minute.”
He went up beyond the front yard a little and caught up with a tall skinny man wearing khaki pants and shirt and no hat. He had a bald spot almost like Uncle Sagamore’s. They talked together for a few minutes and then Uncle Sagamore came back and sat down.
It was nearly sundown now, and up there in the big swarm of men around the carnival they was hanging some electric lights on tree limbs and over the stage in front of the girl tent. I guess there was a generator on one of the trucks.
Just then the sheriff and the new deputy and Booger came around the corner of the house. They was really beat down. Booger had red rims around his eyes and a stubble of beard, and his clothes was dusty and sweat-stained. The sheriff was limping and his clothes was in about as bad a shape as Booger’s.
“Set and rest a spell, men,” Uncle Sagamore says. “You look kind of done in. Any luck yet?”
Booger and the new deputy sat down, just kind of collapsing on the steps. The sheriff stood there, swaying a little on his feet and staring real cold at Uncle Sagamore.
“No luck yet,” he says. “But we expect to find her any minute now. The dawgs is making their fourth trip across the bottom, hot on her trail. As near as I can figger, that adds up to about seventeen miles. She was barefooted and hadn’t even been off pavement before in her life, so it stands to reason she couldn’t be very far ahead of ‘em now.”
Uncle Sagamore scratched his leg with his toenail. “Well sir, it would sure seem like it.”
The sheriff nodded. “Unless, of course, she’s stretched out into a real hard run. You got to take that into consideration; she’s only been going twenty-four hours. And after she wore off the tender part of her feet, say up about half-way to her knees, they might quit bothering her and she could make better time.”
Uncle Sagamore nodded too, with his lips pursed up. “She sure is a puzzling thing, all right, Shurf. For the life of me I just can’t figure it out.”
The sheriff exploded then. He stuck a finger right in Uncle Sagamore’s face and yelled, with his face purple. “Sagamore Noonan! Where is that girl?”
Uncle Sagamore looked at him in surprise. “Why, Shurf, how would I know? Ain’t I been looking for her myself practically night and day?”
Before the sheriff could say anything else, somebody called him from up near the edge of the crowd. We all looked up that way, and it was Otis. He came limping down through the yard, and he looked about as done in as the others. His eyes was red like he hadn’t had any sleep, and he hadn’t shaved.
The sheriff rubbed his hands across his face and says to Otis, “How’s it going out there?”
Otis kind of collapsed on the steps too. “Well,” he says, “they got the highway clear, with road blocks set up so no more hunters can get through to clog it up again. There’s three wreckers and a bulldozer workin’ on