Chapters (12)
Stay home? Uncle Benny stay home? Two weeks after the accident the wreck of the Model-T disappeared from behind the garage where Will had dragged it. The next day the seven bird-dogs disappeared. The day after that Doc and Uncle Benny went to Ocala in Doc’s car. Will wouldn’t answer me when I asked him questions. The Old Hen stopped by the garage and got a Coca-Cola and she didn’t know any more than I did. Then Will pointed down the road.
He said, “Yonder he comes.”
And yonder he came. You could tell him way off by the white bandage with the tufts of hair sticking up over it. He was scrooched down behind the wheel of what looked like a brand-new automobile. Doc was following behind him. They swooped into the garage.
Will said, “It’s a new second-hand body put on the chassis and around the engine of the old Ford.”
Uncle Benny got out and he greeted us.
He said, “Will, it’s just possible it was the motor of the Model-T that had takened the training. The motor ain’t hurt, and me and Doc are real hopeful.”
The Old Hen said, “Benny, where’d you get the money to pay for it?”
He said, “Why, a daggone bootlegger in a truck going from Miami to New York bought the bird-dogs for twenty-five dollars apiece. The low-down rascal knowed good and well they was worth seventy-five.”
She brightened some. Getting shut of the bird-dogs was a little progress. She walked over to the car and begun looking around it.
“Benny,” she said, and her voice come kind of faintified, “if you sold the bird-dogs, what’s this place back here looks like it was fixed for ’em?”
We all looked, and here was a open compartment-like in the back, fixed up with seven crocus sacks stuffed with corn shucks. About that time here come a cloud of dust down the road. It was the seven bird-dogs. They were about give out. Their tongues were hanging out and their feet looked blistered.
Uncle Benny said, “I knowed they’d jump out of that bootlegger’s truck. I told him so.”
I tell you, what’s in a man’s nature you can’t change. It takened the Old Hen thirty years and all them goings-on to learn it. She went and climbed in the front seat of the car and just sat there waiting for Uncle Benny to drive home for his dinner. He lifted the bird-dogs up and set them down to rest on the corn-shucks cushions, and he brought them a pan of water.
He said, “I figure they busted loose just about Lawtey.”
The Old Hen never opened her mouth. She hasn’t quarrelled at him from that day to this. She was hornswoggled.