The Poplar Standard

Brainy 'Possum Hound Outwits Sequatchie County Jewel Thief
By BILLY ROSE

A few days ago I got the following letter from a Mr. Jake Withers of Sequatchie county, Tennessee:

Dear Mister Billy Rose,

In some recent issues of the Nashville Tennessean I noticed the columns you wrote about educated animals—dogs that could add and subtract, and horses that could figure out cube roots—and so I figured you might be interested in hearing about the smartest four-legged critter in the history of Sequatchie county.

To begin at the beginning. there's a truck farmer down here by the name of Lem Albright who owns a 'possum hound which is as black as the inside of a tar barrel. Lem calls him "Einstein" and, to hear Lem tell it, the dog has more brains than a passel of professors—and after what happened the other night at our smoked-ham supper and square dance, most everyone in Sequatchie is inclined to agree.

Here's what happened:

A couple of weeks ago, Mrs. Will Purdy's mother, who lived across the line in Grundy county, passed away, and when the family gathered for the divvying up, Will's wife got a gold brooch set with eight diamonds, three of them genuine. Needless to say, she wore the brooch to the smoked-ham supper and square dance, and needless to recount, it got more attention than a team-of-four with their tails trimmed. Everything went smooth as molasses at the social until right in the middle of a "swing your partner" when Mrs. Purdy let out a screech and fainted dead away. And when they brought her around, she began hollering for someone to lock the doors because her brooch had been stolen from right off her chest.

Fortunately, our sheriff was on hand, and after he banged the lid of the piano to get people quiet he said, "Don't nobody leave this room. I hate to say it, but there's a low-down, thievin' crook in our midst, and I'm a-goin' to search every man-jack until I find Mrs. Purdy's brooch."

"Sheriff," said Lem Albright, "I don't think that'll hardly be necessary. My hound Einstein, as you know, is the best-behaved animal in Sequatchie county, but the one thing he can't abide is to have a thief scratch his belly. So, sure as shootin', the minute he feels the fingernails of the fella we're after, he'll start in to yowl, and we'll have the thief in no time a-tall."

Some of us began to laugh, but the sheriff took Lem aside, talked to him a minute, and then banged the piano lid again.

"I don't rightly know whether Lem's notion is going to work," he said, "but there ain't no harm in givin' it a try. I'm goin' to ask him to take Einstein in the next room, and then I want all of you to get in single file and come in one at a time and scratch the hound's belly."

Everybody, including the fiddlers, did as told, and sure enough, 20 minutes later the sheriff pointed at a farmhand as he came out from seeing the hound and said, "It worked, like Jake said—there's the criminal."

When the man was grabbed and searched, the brooch was found in his pocket, and so, on top of a smoked-ham supper and square dance, there was a running-out-of-town party to top off the evening. And all in all, it was easily the most successful social in a long while.

Next day, when Lem was interviewed by the editor of our paper, he didn't brag much about his hound. "To tell the truth," he said, "the sheriff and me, we wasn't too sure Einstein could spot the criminal, so we helped out a mite. I rubbed a little soot from the stove on the hound's underside, and every time anyone came out of the room the sheriff looked at his hands. The first person with clean hands figured to be our man, because the thief was a cinch to make believe he was scratchin' Einstein without really touchin' his belly a-tall."

Yours truly,
Jake Withers.