Uncle Sagamore and His Girls by Charles Williams

and then they’d stand around making bets whether the Sheriff would find the still. Two men got in a fight, and Booger had to break it up. At noon the Sheriff came up from the bottom with his men. His clothes was drenched with sweat, and he looked beat.
    “There ain’t no still,” Otis says. He leaned against one of the shed stanchions like he was about to collapse, and looked at the tubs. “I don’t know what he’s up to. Maybe nobody’ll ever know. But there just ain’t no still on this place.”
    “We ain’t goin’ to give up,” the Sheriff says. “We either find it or prove to these people there ain’t any. Start searching the buildings.”
    They searched the barn, and the house, and even our trailer. They crawled through Uncle Finley’s ark. I could hear him cussing at them. Then I saw Murph. He weaved his way down through the cars in his convertible. I walked over. He looked upset. “Hey, haven’t we got a crowd?” I says. “It’s almost like when Miss Harrington got lost—”
    “You haven’t seen anything yet,” he says. “Wait till tomorrow.” He handed me the paper that was lying on the seat.
    I spread it open, and by golly the whole front page was nothing but pictures of the hog feed, and big headlines about it. There was one of me shelling corn, and one of Curly pointing to the tubs and grinning. BLOSSOM COUNTY’S SHAME , it says. There was a lot more printing that went on to the back pages. Some of the words I didn’t understand, and I didn’t try to read it all, but I could see this Major Kincaid was real worked up about the whole thing.
    “You don’t have to take our word for it,” it wound up. “Go out and see for yourself this complete breakdown of law enforcement. And then vote for the man who can clean up this mess—J. L. (Curly) Minifee.”
    “Sure looks like Curly’s goin’ to win the election, don’t it?” I said.
    “You can say that again,” Murph says. “Uh—Billy, has Sagamore been acting strange lately?”
    “How do you mean?” I asked.
    “Well, like he’d been out in the sun too much, or something?”
    “No,” I says. I couldn’t figure what he was driving at. “He seems just the same as always.”
    Just then there was a big blaring of music, and we looked up to see Curly’s sound truck coming down the hill. It stopped in a little open space, and Curly got out in his fancy white suit. He walked down through the cars and looked at the stuff in the tubs. Then he came over to the convertible, leaned an arm on the windshield, and grinned at the pictures on the front page of the paper.
    “The barefooted genius around today?” he asked Murph.
    “I wouldn’t know,” Murph says, sort of cold.
    “I just wanted to thank him for all his help.”
    “Why don’t you sell him some more tires?” Murph asked.
    “Oh, I aim to.” Curly lit one of his cigars, blew out the match real careful, and dropped it on the seat by Murph’s leg. “I’m not one to forget a good customer. But I guess he was kind of overrated, from the looks of it.”
    He clapped Murph on the shoulder, and went back up to his truck. Murph said a cuss word. Then we heard the loudspeakers, and looked up that way. Curly was standing on the running board of the truck with the microphone in his hand. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Curly Minifee again. I just thought I’d stop by and see how things are going at the Noonan Brothers Old Popskull assembly plant—”
    “You tell ’em, Curly!” somebody yelled. All the people began to crowd around to listen. I saw another car pull up, and it was Major Kincaid and his photographer. The Sheriff and his men was coming up from the ark.
    “I see we’ve got a nice turnout today,” Curly went on with a big grin, “and that the Sheriff’s doin’ his usual good job of handling the crowds—”
    There was a big laugh, and then a lot of boos at the Sheriff. The Sheriff got red in the face, and cussed, and then he run over to one of the cars