Clyde: “Uh . . . give me some time on that one . . .”
Hank: “Stop! No more, I can’t stand it!”
I staggered several steps away and slumped against a tree. Suddenly I felt light-headed and faint. My pulse was racing and I could feel my eyes bulging on every heartbeat. And I was drooling at the mouth.
Clyde was watching me. His jowls drooped, his ears drooped, his entire face drooped. “What’s the trouble?”
I took a deep, trembling breath and closed my eyes. “I . . . I’m not sure. All of a sudden everything just . . . I’m not well, Clyde.”
“Ralph.”
My eyes popped open. “You really are Ralph, aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“Came fishing with Jimmy Joe the Dog Catcher.”
“I was afraid of that. Do you know what this means?”
“Fish don’t bite after a rain.”
“No. It means my entire case has collapsed. Hours and days of work, all for nothing.”
“Gosh, I’m sure sorry.”
“You’re not entirely to blame. But then,” I stood up, took a deep breath, and smiled a brave smile, “but then I can’t very well blame myself, can I?”
“Reckon not.”
“And so the mystery slips behind the veil once more. Well! You’re free to go, Ralph. I have no evidence, no case. I can’t hold you any longer.”
“Guess I’ll go see if Jimmy Joe’s caught any fish.”
“Yes, do that, Ralph. Have fun for both of us. It must be nice to enjoy simple things.”
“It’s perty good. See you around, Hank, and I hope you catch the killer.”
“Ummm, indeed . . . yes.”
Chapter Eight: On Trial in the Horse Pasture
Ralph left and I made my way back toward headquarters. I hobbled down the creek a ways until I came to the place where the horses had worn a path up the hill, then I dragged myself up on top.
I had come down that hill a lot faster than I went up it, which explained why I was hobbling and dragging around. Sure was sore.
I got to the top of the hill and stopped to catch my breath and rest my bones and let the wind blow my ears around. Down below, I could see Ralph making his way up the creek toward a man who was fishing on the bank.
Ralph and his big ears had certainly ruined my case. Just when I’d thought the clues were lined up and moving in the right direction, he’d started yapping about fresh, young, tender, juicy, larruping good chick . . . never mind, just never mind. There was something about those words that . . . never mind again.
I started back to headquarters, keeping to the ditch beside the county road. A big tank truck came along, blowing dark smoke out the two chimneys above the cab. Under ordinary conditions, I would have barked him off the ranch, but I was too sore to get myself worked up into a good mad. I just sat in the ditch and glared at him as he roared past.
I went on down the road, limping and counting my miseries, when I heard hoofbeats in the distance. I looked around and saw the entire horse herd coming my way, the work string as well as the brood mares. I hoped they were going to water and hadn’t seen me, and I crouched down in the grass.
I have no use for horses, just don’t like ’em. They’ve got this superior attitude, see, that makes them hard to take even on a good day. And so far, this hadn’t been one of my better days.
They came kicking and bucking down the hill. I stretched out flat on the ground and directed all my powers of concentration toward making myself invisible. Horses don’t have such good eyes, don’t you know, and they can be fooled.
The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by thirteen head of horses, which just goes to show that sometimes they can’t be fooled. I didn’t move, just rolled my eyes around the circle of horse heads. You don’t realize how big they are until you’ve got thirteen of them standing over you.
I figgered maybe they had seen me and there was no use trying to hide anymore. “Afternoon,” I said.
Silence. Then a cocky, stocky bay horse named Casey spoke up. “Say, puppy, you know where you are?”
I looked around. “Uh, let’s see. There’s the barn over there . . .”
“You in the horse pasture, son. You in our place. You in trouble.”
“That so?” I pushed myself up to a sitting position. “Well, maybe you don’t remember who I am.”
“You’re the ranch mutt, ain’t you?”
“No, you’re thinking of Drover—short haired, stub-tailed little white dog.”
“No, I’m thinking of you, puppy.”
“In that case you must know that I’m Hank the Cowdog, Head of Ranch Security.” For some reason, they all laughed. “Did I say something funny?”
Casey wore a sneer on his big flappy mouth. “Son, you may be a hot dog over on your side of the fence, but you in the horse pasture now, and in the horse pasture, hey, if you ain’t a horse, you ain’t nuthin’.”
“That’s just your opinion, of course. In my circles we think just the opposite.”
Casey bent his head down. “Explain what you mean by that.”
“Well uh, we often say that if you ain’t nuthin you can’t possibly be a horse. I’m sure you’d go along with that.”
He gave me a blank stare. Then he grinned and exposed two rows of the biggest teeth I’d ever seen. “But the point is, you in the wrong place and we don’t like dogs.”
“I can understand that. I’ve met a few I didn’t like either. There’s good and bad in every breed. I’m sure you’d go along with that.” He shook his head. “Or maybe you wouldn’t.”
I was beginning to feel a little lonesome there in the middle of all those horses and figgered it was time to check out the escape routes. It appeared to me that every exit passed between a horse’s legs, which wasn’t too encouraging.
A guy could get his back stepped on trying to escape, which is probably why the old-timers used to say, “Don’t put all your backs in one exit.” Might get stepped on, see.
“You know what we do with dogs that get into our pasture?” asked Casey.
“No, I don’t, but maybe I should point something out here . . .”
“We bite ’em. We push ’em around with our noses. We step on their tails.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten that I have clearance to work this entire ranch, including the horse pasture.”
“Heh.” Casey looked around the circle. “All right, y’all, we got us a dog here, accused of trespassing. This court is now in session.”
“Now hold on just a . . .”
“Does the defendant have anything to say?”
I stood up. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I . . .”
“Sit down, son. The defense rests its case. No further questions. Now, let the prosecution present its case.”
A big brown horse named Popeye stepped out. “He’s guilty.”
“You sure?”
“Yup.”
Casey looked down at me and shook his head. “Puppy, looks like the evidence in this case is just overwhelming.”
I looked around the circle of eyes. All the horses were stamping at flies and swishing their tails. I pinned my ears back and growled. “You can’t get by with this.” That was the best I could come up with.
Casey turned to his pals. “After hearing all the evidence in this case and giving this pup a fair trial, we find him guilty of trespassing in the horse pasture. What shall the sentence be?”
“Bite him.”
“Bite him.”
“Bite him!”
By this time the hair was standing up on my back and deep growls were rumbling up from my throat. “I’d advise you guys to keep your distance, because the first horse that . . .”
At that very moment one of the horses behind me
bent down and bit me on the bohunkus. I jumped straight up and squalled, wheeled around and bit him right back on the nose. Another one got me on the back. I nailed him, but by that time they were coming from all directions.
I was by George surrounded, and while I’m fairly comfortable with odds of five- or six-to-one, this fight showed signs of getting out of hand. It was time to light a shuck and get the heck out of there.
I tore into them, knocked three or four of ’em to the ground, and literally clawed and gnawed my way to daylight. With three head of horses on my tail, I sprinted across open ground toward the home pasture and ducked under the barbed wire fence just in the nick of time.
With the fence between us, I turned to Casey and Popeye and Happy. “Let that be a lesson to you!” They laughed. “Next time, you won’t get off so easy.” They laughed harder.
There’s no future in trying to talk to a bunch of danged smart-alecky horses. I had made my point and throwed a good scare into ’em and I didn’t have time for any more foolishness. I had work to do.
It took me a good five minutes to lick down all the spots where they’d bit me and made my hair stand up, and there was one place in the middle of my back that I couldn’t quite reach. I bent my neck as far around as it would go, extended my tongue to its maximum length, and walked around in circles trying to get a good lick at it. But every time I moved, it moved, and it managed to stay just a few inches beyond the reach of my tongue.
This was very frustrating. I try to keep my coat neat, don’t you know, and I don’t like to go around looking like the rats had chewed on me all night. I chased that derned spot until my tongue got tired and my head was spinning. Never did get it, had to roll in some mud to smooth it down.
I hopped up and gave myself a good shake, scratched a spot just below my left ear and tried to recall what I’d been working on before that maniac cowboy had hit me with his pickup door and knocked me into Spook Canyon.
Let’s see: Ralph . . . the mailman . . . the horses . . . Beulah, mercy me, I could still see her gorgeous collie ears flapping in the wind as I ran along beside the pickup, and her perfect collie nose, and her brown eyes melting in adoration as she watched her hero perform death-defying tricks that no ordinary dog, especially Plato, could have matched.
Why, at that very moment she was probably gazing into the distance and sobbing, wondering if the love of her life had survived his plunge off the cliff. No doubt she had tried to leap out of the pickup and rush to my side, but Plato had stopped her. I could almost hear it:
“No, Beulah, I can’t let you do this.”
“Let me go, he needs me!”
“But you could be killed, jumping out of a moving pickup.”
“Better to die in love than to live in anguish. I leap now into the great unknown, to join my beloved cowdog who lieth wounded and bleeding and calleth my name!”
“Don’t be foolish, Beulah!”
“Unhand me, I must go to him!”
“No, I can’t allow it!”
Etc.
Actually, Plato was right in stopping her. She might have broken a leg jumping out of the pickup. It’s amazing, what a woman in love will do. And just think: she was ready to do all that just for me! Kind of makes a guy wonder what it is about himself that gets the ladies so stirred up. Good looks are part of the answer, but there’s bound to be more to it than that.
Well, I was in the midst of these delicious thoughts when it suddenly occurred to me that when I’d left my post several hours ago, I had been involved in a very serious investigation, The Case of the Vanishing Chickens. Ordinarily, I’m not easily distracted, and yet . . . I had been distracted easily.
Well, I had wasted enough time with women and jailhouse dogs and horses and the mailman. I had work to do, clues to find, suspects to interrogate—and a murderer to catch.
Chapter Nine: Drover Confesses
Iset my sights on headquarters and turned on the speed. I roared past those big rolls of rusted barbed wire and the post pile. I was kind of sore at myself for burning so much daylight and . . . was that a cottontail rabbit that came out of the post pile?
I put on the brakes and slid to a stop. Indeed it was, a nice plump little cottontail, and I’ve seen very few days when I was so prosperous that I wouldn’t give a cottontail a run. I wheeled around and went after him.
As I closed the gap on him, he just stood there like a little statue, the way a cottontail will do when he thinks he’s invisible in the grass. That was just fine. I took two final jumps, leaped through the air, and landed right in the middle of him.
I lifted one paw and he wasn’t there. I lifted the other paw and he wasn’t there again. Hmm. I glanced around and saw him about five feet to the north, sitting as stiff as a post with his ears pointed up.
Okay, he wanted to be clever, I could be clever too. I stood up and shook my head—that was to throw him off, see, make him think I was confused. Then I sat down and scratched my ear, but as you may have already guessed, I watched him out of the corner of my eye. It was all part of my clever plan.
But you know what? Once I got to scratching on that ear, it felt so good I didn’t want to quit. I found a spot there that probably hadn’t been scratched in years, and I just can’t describe how good it felt.
First I scratched it real hard. Then I kind of leaned my head into my paw and rubbed it from both ends. It sent delicious tingling sensations down my back and out to the end of my tail, felt so derned good that my eyes started drooping.
It’s funny. All his life a guy looks for happiness and contentment. He looks for it in his work and his love life, and he tends to overlook the little things, like scratching a certain spot just above his ear.
Well, I scratched and I rubbed, and I rubbed and I scratched, and my eyelids drooped and I relaxed all over, and after a while I just kind of melted—fell over backwards, you might say. I lay there for a long time, looking up at the puffy white clouds and blinking my eyes.
Then I jumped up and shook the grass off my coat and . . . HUH? My head snapped around, just in time to see that sniveling little cottontail hop into one of the pipes in the cattleguard. In other words, I had wasted more time and burned more daylight, fooling around with a dadgum rabbit.
I headed for the machine shed. In this business, you’ve got to be alert all the time. You’ve got to concentrate on your objective and shut the little distractions out of your mind, because no matter how you look at it, the little things in this life are still little, and it takes a special kind of dog . . . never mind.
Before I reached headquarters, I had already reviewed the case in my mind. Last night: one murder. This morning: a second murder. Suspects: zero. Clues: none. Overall status of case in progress: not so good.
I won’t say that my whole career was riding on this case, because after all, I had enjoyed a rather glorious career and had solved many mysteries. But if I didn’t break this case pretty quick, it wouldn’t look good.
I slowed down and coasted up to the machine shed. High Loper and Drover were standing in the door, and I went over to them. When Loper saw me coming, he narrowed his eyes and said, “Here he comes now.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
He told us to sit down and he went into the machine shed. While he was gone, I turned to Drover. “What’s up?”
He looked up and squinted at the sky. “Well . . .”
“What’s Loper got on his mind?”
“Oh. Oh-h-h Hank, he found the feathers down by the creek and he knows about the chicken murders!”
That was a piece of bad news. I had hoped to have the case wrapped up before he found out about it.
Just then, Loper came out of the machine shed. He had a brown paper bag in his hand and a very unfriendly expression on his face. He glared down at us and rocked up and down on his toes. Drover was so nervous, he tried to hide be
hind Loper’s leg.
Loper opened up the bag and pulled out a handful of feathers. He held them out for us to smell. I smelled. Drover ducked his head, squirmed around in a circle, and wagged his stub tail. Drover gets very uncomfortable when he can’t run to the machine shed and hide from life’s tribulations.
“Somebody’s been killing chickens around here,” said Loper. “I don’t know who did it. Maybe it was coons. Maybe it was a skunk. Maybe it was coyotes. I don’t know, but I want you dogs to put a stop to it, you hear?”
I whapped my tail against the ground. Drover rolled on his back and held his paws up in the beg position.
“Of course,” Loper shifted his chewing tobacco over to the other cheek, “there’s one other possibility.” He looked at me and I whapped my tail. “Sometimes dogs turn to chicken-killing.”
Well, that was news to me. I’d never heard of such a thing.
“And do you know what happens to chicken-killing dogs?” I looked away and whapped my tail. “They have to be shot. There’s no other cure. Once a dog gets the taste of chicken, it makes him a little crazy.”
It suddenly occurred to me that Drover was acting “a little crazy.” I mean, he was oozing guilt. Was it possible . . . could it be that . . . I couldn’t bring myself to put the pieces of the puzzle together and follow the logic to this conclusion. It was just too awful. And yet . . .
Why was he rolling around that way? Why did he have that silly grin on his face? And come to think of it, where had he been when the murders had been discovered?
As I studied the little mutt, my heart sank. I’ve said before that to be in the security business, you have to be made from a special kind of steel, but nothing I’d ever done in my career had prepared me for this.
Loper stuffed the feathers back into the sack, shook it in my face and then shook it in Drover’s. “No more chicken killing on this ranch or somebody’s head is going to roll, you got that?” He stormed back into the machine shed and left us alone.
We got away from there, went down to the gas tanks. Drover was still trembling all over. “Boy, that was scary! I sure hope we don’t lose any more chickens.”
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie Page 5
