Free Give Up the Body by Louis Trimble

this to happen.”
    The front door slammed. There were footsteps in the hallway. Hilton nodded and left the room abruptly. I stood there alone, gaping after him. I was still standing in the same spot when the door opened again.
    It was Jocko Bedford, the sheriff of Teneskium County. He came in alone. He shut the door carefully, closing out a hum of noise above which I could hear Godfrey Tiffin’s sonorous and insistent voice.
    “You’re one I been wanting to see, Addy,” Jocko said.
    Jocko was an old time lawman. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and a cowhide vest and chewed a neat quid of tobacco. He was a lean, wrinkled man but the wrinkles were from sun and wind as much as age. Jocko was bowlegged too, and after all he had seen as much of the country from a horse as he had from the seat of a car.
    He was a quick old man, and his presence was a break for me. I had known him all my life. He and my father had come across the mountains from the eastern Oregon cattle country together.
    “That’s some rig, Addy,” Jocko said. He shifted his quid from one cheek to the other and looked about for a place to spit. He chose the fireplace and hit it squarely in the center. “If I was you I’d disguise myself better’n that.” He squinted his shrewd blue eyes at me. “Tiffin is out there and he’s after your hide.”
    Godfrey Tiffin had been a prestige-filled senior when I was a sophomore at college. I had made a monkey out of him in debate one time, and previous to that had had the pleasure of chalking him up as my first rejected suitor. As a result he despised me. It was mutual.
    “Can’t he forget?” I demanded angrily. “It all happened years ago.”
    “He’ll crimp your stories, Addy,” Jocko said. “He’s sore because you phoned that murder story before we got the news.”
    “I called him first,” I said. “And besides I didn’t phone a murder story. I …” I had to stop and think a minute. I had mentioned my suspicions but not in my story. “All I did was report the accident and disappearance,” I said lamely. “They must have jumped to conclusions. Anyway, the Press isn’t on the street yet.”
    “On their news broadcast,” Jocko said mildly. “But you must have given ‘em the idea, Addy.”
    “Maybe I did,” I said miserably. And I wasn’t so smart for having the same hunch about murder as Jocko. He had simply borrowed it from me by way of the Press newscast.
    “How’d you know?” Jocko asked in his deceptively mild voice.
    I was about to start the difficult job of explaining when someone hammered on the door. “The search party is starting, sheriff,” a voice called. I recognized Godfrey Tiffin.
    “Join you outside,” Jocko called back. He said to me, “We’ll go into this later, Addy.”
    He opened the door. I waited a moment and followed. The hallway was clear. But the front door was open and a squad of men were standing on the porch. The bright light revealed Godfrey Tiffin in all his glory. He was a tall, horsy young man with very prominent teeth and a balding head. His complexion was pasty and his eyes tended to bug. In fact the only things I had ever found attractive about him were his slim, expressive hands and his voice. He had a William Jennings Bryan voice and he knew it.
    Tiffin was so busy being important that he failed to recognize me in my dilapidated costume. I was just as glad of it. I joined Matt Mulcahey, one of Jocko’s deputies. He was a big, round-faced Irishman, another lifelong friend. I grinned at him. He grinned back, and I felt better.
    Jocko took the job of organizing the search party away from Tiffin. He sent all the deputies but Mulcahey back to the house, herded Tiffin and Hilton in front of him, and started off. Mulcahey and I brought up the rear.
    We skirted the fishponds, following the gravelled pathway down the far side of them so that we reached the end of the path at the river and downstream from the dam. I felt less shaky now. It was partly due to