Uncle Sagamore and His Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

of flinched when Uncle Sagamore drew back the rock, and then grinned and shook his head.
    Uncle Sagamore pounded on the cap two or three times and then twisted and it come right off. He took out his chew of tobacco, tilted the canteen back, and had a long drink. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and passed the canteen to Pop.
    “I kind of figgered they might be up there,” he says. “Election year, they take a real interest in whatever you’re doin’.”
    “Sure looks that way,” Pop says. He took a drink. “By the way, I reckon this was the empty one?”
    “Oh,” Uncle Sagamore says. He put the chew of tobacco back in and shifted it around in his cheek. “It was empty, all right. I found it down there by the slough a couple year ago. We had a real dry summer and the water got purty low, and doggone if here wasn’t that Redlands Loan Company safe stickin’ up out of it with the door blowed all to hell. Police’d been lookin’ for it for years. The slough filled up again when the fall rains started, so I reckon nobody else ever did see it.”
    Pop nodded. “Well, they say it’s right touchy stuff.” Uncle Sagamore reached for the canteen. “Well, I sure wouldn’t want to fool with it, after seein’ the door of that safe. But don’t worry about it. I warshed the canteen out with branch water before I filled her.”
    * THE DIAMOND BIKINI by Charles Williams, Gold Medal #S607, Sept. 1956

THREE
    W ELL, IT WASN’T MORE than about an hour till here come the Sheriff hisself. He was madder than a wet cat.
    Pop and Uncle Sagamore had finished the stuff in the canteen and we was all lying on the front porch again when the car shot through the gate up there by the sand road and come leaping down the hill over the bumps. Somehow it stopped before it run into the oak tree, and the Sheriff bounced out. He was waving a newspaper in his hand.
    He’s a fat man with a round face and a white mustache, and he’s got a bad set of false teeth that whistle when he’s excited, which seems to be most of the time. He come charging in through the front yard and pointed the newspaper at Uncle Sagamore.
    “Ffffsss—” he says.
    Uncle Sagamore seemed like he was real glad to see him. “Well sir, if’n it ain’t the Shurf,” he says. “Come on in and set.”
    The Sheriff sputtered again, and then he stopped and got hold of hisself. “Sagamore Noonan, what’s this cock-and-bull story about a can of nitroglycerin?”
    Uncle Sagamore stared at him. “A can of what?”
    The Sheriff said four or five bad words all in a row. “That canteen them boys dug up out here—”
    “Oh,” Uncle Sagamore says. He sailed out some tobacco juice. “You must mean my cordial. Didn’t they tell you about them fellers givin’ it to me?”
    “They did,” the Sheriff said. “And I want to know what it was.”
    “What it was?” Uncle Sagamore says. “Why, just like I told ’em. It was a cordial; one of them real fancy—”
    “Where is it?” The Sheriff snapped at him. “What’d you do with it?”
    “Why,” Uncle Sagamore says, “we drunk it.”
    “ You drunk it? ”
    Uncle Sagamore nodded. “We sure did. And you know somethin’, Shurf, that charcoal really done the trick. Filtered the fusel oil out of her slicker’n a whistle, and she tasted fine.”
    He reached around behind him and got the canteen. “Sure wish we’d knowed you was comin’,” he said. “We’d of saved you a nip.”
    The Sheriff took the empty canteen, sniffed it, and then cussed and threw it out in the yard. “All right,” he says, real cold. “The last time it was croton oil that was supposed to be whiskey, and this time it’s whiskey that’s supposed to be nitroglycerin. But I’m tellin’ you straight, Sagamore Noonan, you’re crowdin’ your luck. You try makin’ one drop of likker on this place and you’re goin’ back to the pen so fast it’ll singe your whiskers clear off.”
    Uncle Sagamore looked like his feelings