On a warm spring night in the Appalachian highlands, a slight breeze ruffled the sugar maples as scudding clouds played across the silver face of the moon. Two figures transited a clearing, fetching up against a wooded copse of smaller trees and underbrush. The sweet reverie of the evening was thus broken:
“Consarn it, Luke! I tol’ ya that thicket weren’t no place fer th’ still! Cain’t hardly see nuthin’!”
“Well, dagnabbit, Bobby Lee, it ain’t supposed to be out in plain sight, ya ninny,” replied his companion, hands on hips in irritation. “Git the durned flashlight!”
“Well, shoot, yuh don’t have to get all miffy,” Bobby Lee muttered as he pawed through his rucksack for the forgotten flashlight, accompanied by peevish snorts and whatnot from Luke. The torch was retrieved. A click; a curse; a rattle; a click: light. The light swung toward the trees, the beam illuminating…trees.
After a moment of stunned silence, Bobby Lee gawped, “Shoot! Luke, whar’s thet still? Weren’t it right thar in them trees? We come up th’ wrong hill, d’ye reckon?”
“Dang, Bobby Lee, yuh mortal igno-ramus, cain’t you see thet still done been stole?” Luke snapped with absolutely no pun intended. He indicated a shiny coil of wire lying in a portion of the copse that appeared to have been recently trodden. “Must be them durn Hilliards from over the holler.”
“Well, shoot, Luke, whatcha think it’s the Hilliards fer? You know them no-account Balls been talkin’ trash ever since they ol’ coonhound fetched up and died,” Bobby Lee offered. “I ain’t never pisened no dawg,” he finished, in an unconvincing mumble.
“Well, we cain’t get nuthin’ done standin’ here jawin’ about it,” Luke pointed out. “Let’s see if there ain’t tar tracks er somethin’ we can foller.”
So the two sleuths tramped about the area, and before long, Bobby Lee espied some tar—er, tire, imprints, which caused our heroes much excitement.
“Luke! Git on over here, now! I found ‘em! Them’s the tar prints o’ them what stole the still! Ah kin tell ‘cause they’s deeper in the dirt then our tar marks, accountin’ fer the extra weight o’ the still in the back o’ they truck,” Bobby Lee concluded, feeling mighty smart. Luke inspected the prints and grinned widely with his remaining teeth.
“Well, now, Bobby Lee,” he opined, “Thet were a right sharp piece o’ detective work you done, and I do believe ah kin do one mahself: I bet I kin tell ya jes’zackly whose truck it was done keeried off thet still.”
“Knock y’self out,” Bobby Lee obliged.
“It was ‘em Barnetts, live up on th’ hill,” Luke stated, then upon viewing Bobby Lee’s skeptical expression, continued, by way of explanation, “Yuh know how Ol’ Man Barnett drives thet ol’ truck with the busted-out mirrors?”
“Yeah,” concurred Bobby Lee, “Ever’body knows he’s too durn cheap to get ‘em fixed—he won’t pay fer nuthin’ but keep that ol’ thing runnin’. But whut’s yer point? You cain’t look at tar tracks and see no busted mirrors!”
“Keep yer britches on. Muh point was thet Ol’ Man Barnett is so cheap, he don’t wanna buy proper tars fer his vee-hicle neither. He won’t never shell out the money fer a whole set o’ tars, so whut he does is: he buys two new ones and puts ‘em on the front and back o’ the right haind side, and he rides ‘em bald tars onna lef’ hand side.”
“Whut the hell’s he do thet fer?” from a perplexed Bobby Lee.
“Okay, yuh know how them Barnetts live up a top o’ thet there hill? Well, when the ol’ man’s drivin’ up the mountain, his bald tars is on the outside, cuz it don’t matter none. But when he’s got to go down, he’s got his good tars on the outside, fer traction, like.”
“Thass a cheap ol’ man,” Bobby Lee observed, then continued admiringly, “but durned if it don’t make sense.”
And sure enough, the tire imprints on the ground before them displayed, quite clearly, a healthy tread on one side of the vehicle, whereas clearly the other set of tires were as bald as Willard Scott. So, our heroes, having discerned their target, headed that way in triumph, shotguns at the ready, prepared to make their righteous bust.
But alas, it was not to be. For, upon gaining ingress to the property of the aforementioned Mr. Barnett, Luke and Bobby Lee found said Barnett, accompanied by a retinue of rather sizeable nephews, holding forth in the dirt yard of his abode. As the pair drove up, they could see that the old man was quite agitated.
“Hell-fahr! Wait’ll I git my hands on them varmints whut stole ol’ Bessie; I’ll whup ‘em sideways,” expressed the old man to his posse, who were standing about with expressions which ran the gamut of emotions from bored patience to patient boredom. They clearly had been giving audience to the old man’s frustrations for quite some time. When Luke’s dusty pickup rattled onto the property, this new development in their evening garnered immediate attention.
“Appears to be some commotion in th’ yard,” observed Luke, squinting through the window of the pickup.
“Bout to be a lot more commotion,” Bobby Lee commented, patting the stock of his .30-gauge.
“Hold yer water, dagnabbit! There’s too many of ‘em boys. Mebbe this is a good time fer finesse.”
“Finesse mah butt crack,” Bobby Lee muttered, but he left the firearm in the gun rack. They approached the Barnetts, but before they could utter a word, Old Man Barnett fixed one accusing eye on each of his visitors (he’d been like that since birth), demanding in a screech, “You boys wouldn’ta happen to have recently ack-quired a truck, would ya?”
“We already got a truck,” Luke declared, returning Barnett’s right eye’s suspicious stare in spades. “We seem to be missing a still.”
“Whut you lookin’ here, fer??” grunted one of the towering nephews.
“The still done got stole in yore truck, Barnett!” blurted Bobby Lee—not a master of the “finesse” concept—at Barnett’s left eye.
“Well, ain’t that rich,” cackled Barnett, “Mebbe if ye find out who stole my dang truck, ya might find yore dang still!”
Luke and Bobby Lee were suspicious of this new information, but Barnett offered to show them around the place in order to prove that the truck was no longer present. He waved toward a dilapidated lean-to beside the barn, which served as a makeshift carport for the missing vehicle. “We was out at the hog sale with Chappie Smith in his flatbed, and when we come back I noticed some varmint’d swiped mah Bessie. If ye reckon ye might find some sorta clue here, knock y’self out,” Barnett snarked.
Luke observed the oil stains on the ground that did seem to confirm that a vehicle had been kept there. He poked around a bit in the hay that was strewn in the area while Bobby Lee grumbled darkly about all the nearby places you might hide a truck with a still in it. After a few minutes, he stopped and picked up a piece of crockery that had been lying hidden. He inspected it with great scrutiny, then his grizzled face beamed with the light of realization.
“Royal Dalton,” he nodded to himself.
“I b’lieve that’s Franciscanware, actually,” Bobby Lee volunteered.
Luke emitted a long-suffering sigh and explained, “Not Royal Doulton, ya nit; Royal Dalton. He sells odds and ends of fine china up at th’ flea market. I’m bettin’ this bit fell outta his pocket or pants cuff or somethin’.”
“Balls o’ hellfire!” declared Barnett. “Chappie an’ me done seen his sorry hide up at th’ hog sale, but he wuz on his way out in a big hurry—he knew there wouldn’t be nobody home! Shoot, I knew he wuz still ate up over the fack that I wouldn’t buy any more o’ them dang Majolica pitchers!”
So Luke and Bobby Lee led the caravan of Barnetts to the doorstep of Royal Dalton, whom they caught red-handed and red-nosed, passed out on a mattress in front of his doublewide and reeking of moonshine. The still was still in the bed of the truck, both of which were discovered by our intrepid search party, under a suspiciously truck-shaped tarp.
Needless to say, Mr. Dalton was whupped soundly by the aggrieved parties, all of whom swore they’d never trusted his sorry hide, knowing full well they’d be back at his flea market booth the next time they had an eye on the newest item in the Spode Christmas Tree service.
In Possum Hollow, all’s well that ends well.
Image courtesy of Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/moon-at-night-moonlight-full-moon-54671/
