As Demon followed close on his heels into his office, Buck hoped he was right.

His secretary was not convinced. She stared at the massive animal that settled under Buck’s desk, red tongue lolling out of its fanged mouth.

“That’s the last thing I’d have for a pet,” she observed. “What does it eat – truck bodies?”

Buck didn’t answer. He was going through a stack of telephone messages. He was rarely late, and never had he gotten into the office with so much urgent business piled up and waiting for him. There were four or five calls from the volunteer director of the newly organized Committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas. So far the committee’s nasty attitude on the subject of the cancellation of the Christmas living manger scene had made Buck wonder if they correctly understood the implications of their name. There was also a message in answer to a call Buck had left that morning before he left home: the Methodist minister’s wife, Grace Heamstead, had a houseful of company and couldn’t come herself but would send her daughter Judith over with some clothes from the church’s emergency clothes closet.

Buck put the note aside. He’d hoped Grace would come over with clothes for the Scraggs girls herself. It had seemed to him that a little finesse might be needed to get Scarlett and her sister into better, if nonetheless used clothing. There was something pathetically prideful in the two Scraggses that even Buck could see.

He picked up another memo, this one from his deputy sergeant in charge of state law-enforcement bureau liaison, reporting on the lack of information on thieves who were specializing in hijacking quarter-of-a-million-dollar tractor-trailer rigs in Jackson County.

If the sheriff’s department didn’t get something substantial pretty soon, Buck knew he was going to be inundated with inquiries from the Georgia Department of Criminal Investigation wanting to know details of the problem. Not to mention the considerable unhappiness already being heard from the local packinghouse and truckers.

Two refrigerated tractor-trailer rigs, one of them loaded with beef, had disappeared during December. The way the hijackers were operating, Buck had a feeling they would come back for at least another heist before they moved their operation elsewhere.

Convulsively, Buck yawned. Usually he didn’t feel so bushed in the morning, but he hadn’t slept well. He still didn’t know what had prevailed upon him to spend the whole night on the couch downstairs with the television going. And early morning, with the knowledge that the two Scraggs females were in the house, had set him on edge. He’d showered in his mother’s room, taking advantage of her private bath, but even so had been surprised by the strange child hobbling down the hallway with the giant dog when he sneaked back wearing only a towel.

That damned dog.

Buck shuffled through the piles of messages listlessly. The thing was called Demon, a fitting name if ever there was one. It had developed a neurotic fixation where he was concerned as it seldom let him out of its sight. He hadn’t been able to get rid of the dog even during breakfast, when it kept licking his hand and leaning on his knees under the table. He’d had to finish his cereal standing up at the refrigerator, and he’d taken his cup of coffee out to the Blazer, intending to finish it on the way to work.

That had been a mistake.

The dog had followed him and when Buck locked the doors it jumped into the Blazer through an open window, knocking Buck’s coffee all over his uniform. When he called the Scraggs females to haul it out, the dog had defied even them, baring its teeth and snarling when they tried to touch it.

“It’s Demon’s way of saying she don’t want to,” the gnomish child had explained blandly. “Sometimes she bites.”

Buck wasn’t going to put it to the test. On the way down to the department he had considered opening the door and shoving the dog out into traffic, but attempted illegal disposal of animals was a punishable offense. He didn’t feel like risking it, anyway; not as the county sheriff.

Now he stared at his telephone messages with a tired, unfocused gaze. He hoped he was never called upon to explain how he had been withstood by a mongrel beast that had refused to be evicted from a county law-enforcement vehicle.

“Buck,” his secretary said, coming to the door of the inner office, “your telephone’s ringing. Do you want me to take it?”

He shook his head. His telephone had been ringing for quite a while. Buck lifted it. “Grissom here,” he intoned.

“Buck?” The voice was that of the bureau supervisor in the state criminal investigation department, Byron Turnipseed. “I hear you got a rash of truck hijackings in Jackson County. What’s going on?”

“Just a moment.” Buck reached down and lifted Demon’s head from where it was resting burdensomely on his left knee. “Byron, yes, I’ve got problems,” he said morosely. “Which one do you want to hear first? The separation-of-church-and-state injunction to mess up our Christmas pageant on the courthouse lawn we’ve had up here for about fifty years? The local nuts and their Committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas? Or a couple of” – Buck suddenly hesitated – “uh, runaways.”

He’d decided at the last second not to describe Ancil Scraggs’s granddaughters and how they happened to be spending Christmas with him. No one would understand, anyway. Not down in Atlanta.

The voice on the telephone quickly reminded Sheriff Grissom that the state’s concern was not runaways but hijackers. Buck managed a weary smile. He didn’t hear the rest as the voice in the telephone was drowned out by a series of disturbing sounds from the outer office.

Buck thought he heard his secretary, Madelyne Smith, uttering strange, shrill noises that were not at all like her usual conversation. Then he heard the deeper voice of the deputy, Moses Holt, saying something that sounded like: “Halt, hold it right there!”

At the same time, the big black dog under his desk came to life. Snarling and barking, it tried to squeeze past Buck’s legs.

“Holy -” Buck grabbed at the edge of his desk so as not to be tipped out of his chair. “Hang on,” he managed to say to Atlanta as, in the outer office, Madelyne Smith’s voice hit a higher decibel.

The dog tangled for a brief second in Buck’s telephone wire, then jerked the receiver out of his hand before breaking free. The criminal investigation department continued to talk as the receiver swung off the edge of the desk.

Buck was wearing his gun. As Demon barreled past him his chair went over, dumping Buck to the floor. He still managed to clap his hand over his service revolver. A reflex action, he realized moments later, that was eminently prudent. For looking over the edge of his desk, Sheriff Buck Grissom saw a tall, gaunt figure with a flowing beard and disordered gray hair standing in the doorway. Holding a twelve-gauge shotgun pointed straight at him.

Buck didn’t need a description. It was Devil Anse. He was sure nobody else could look like that. From his position on the floor, the hardwood desk between them, it was clear they had the drop on each other.

“Sheriff,” he could hear his deputy shouting, “we got a – a armed intruder!”

“Stay back!” Buck yelled in answer.

He could have used some help right then from the huge dog. Like having it charge Ancil Scraggs and disarm him. But the animal obviously knew shotguns, for it dropped to the floor and lay there on its stomach.

“Sheriff,” Devil Anse said from the doorway, “I come about my female relations, Scarlett and Farrie, what is missing from home. I been told you got them somewheres around.”

Buck lowered himself even more behind the desk so as to minimize a possible blast from the shotgun. From there he could see a stretch of green office carpeting and, in the doorway, a pair of ancient black boots. He considered a bullet in the old man’s foot to disable him. He didn’t think it would work. Not before his desk got blown apart by the twelve-gauge.

“They don’t want to go home,” Buck told him.

“Well, I don’t doubt that,” the voice of Devil Anse replied. “Scarlett’s got a mind of her own, and the little one does what she tells her to. She ain’t easy to live with, Scarlett ain’t.”

Buck was finding that out.

“I don’t know what Scarlett told you,” Devil Anse continued. “She can spin a mighty good story when she gets going. But I ain’t about to force that girl to do nothing she don’t want to.”

Buck, recognizing a new element, thought that over and decided not to comment.

“No sirree,” the grating voice of Scraggs went on, “I ain’t going to trade Scarlett off to Loy Potter’s boy for his new pickup truck. Not if I get a better offer.”

Buck couldn’t help it. He looked around the edge of the desk. “You what?”

“That’s right, Sheriff.” The old man stood leaning one shoulder against the doorjamb, shotgun now resting in the crook of his arm. The fierce, biblical prophet face, surrounded by dirty flowing gray hair, looked almost benign. “Scarlett’s a rare piece,” he said with relish. “Better looking than her maw before she ran off with that Tennessee guitar player.” He paused. “Now, Sheriff, I allus look to where I can make a good trade, anybody who knows me will tell you that. And Scarlett needs a settlin’ hand. Ain’t nothing sinful – Potter’s boy is willing to marry her.”

Buck sat back on his heels. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The old degenerate made it sound like he was trading off a hunting dog. Instead of a perfectly able-bodied – desirable – human being.

For a damned pickup truck.

“What about the little girl?” Buck said carefully.