Читать книгу The Case of the One-Eyed Killer Stud Horse - John R. Erickson - Страница 6

Chapter One: The Case of the Coded Transmission

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Fall is a beautiful time of the year in the Texas Panhandle, or so I thought before the relatives descended upon the ranch for the Thanksgiving holidays and Sally May went lame in her right leg and I found myself involved in the Case of the One-Eyed Killer Stud Horse.

Sounds pretty exciting, huh? Just wait until you meet Tuerto, the One-Eyed Killer Stud Horse. He’ll scare the children so bad, they’ll have to sleep with their mothers and dads for a whole week. They’ll see his gotch eye in their dreams, and if they’re not careful, they’re liable to wet the bed.

Any of you kids who wet the bed, don’t mention my name. Don’t mention your name either. Just pretend it didn’t happen. When Mom and Dad wake up in the night and find that big cold wet spot in the middle of the bed, tell ’em that it rained during the night and the roof leaked.

Where was I? Under the gas tanks, one of my favorite spots on the ranch and the place where many of my adventures seem to begin. Drover and I were asleep on our gunnysack beds, having returned at daylight from our patrols around the ranch.

Little did we know what adventures lay in store for us because we were catching a few winks of sleep after putting in a long night of patrol work. I’ve already said that, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat yourself repeat yourself once in a while in a while.

I love to sleep. Sometimes I dream about bones and long juicy strips of steak fat. I remember one dream in particular when Sally May drove up to the gas tanks and unloaded a strip of steak fat that was half a mile long. That was a dream to remember. It took me two weeks to eat that strip of steak fat. When I was done, I couldn’t walk. Had to crawl around on all-fours with a roller skate under my belly.

That was one of my all-time great dreams. Another involved a fifty-foot steak bone, I mean a bone as big as a tree. Took me a month and a half to eat that rascal. After I’d finished, I was telling Drover about how I’d just by George destroyed a steak bone that looked like a tree.

He gave me his usual stupid expression and said, “You mean you ate that tree that looked like a steak bone?”

I didn’t pay any attention to him, but I spent the next three months sneezing sawdust, which made me wonder. That was all in a dream, of course.

Bone-dreams and steakfat-dreams are wonderful, but perhaps the wonderfulest dreams of all are the ones that star Beulah the Collie.

Ah, Sweet Beulah! Be still my heart! Return to thy cage of ribs and venture not forth into the dark night of darkness like a stalking jungle beast venturing and stalking through the inky dark blackness of . . . something. Love, I guess.

Mercy. Just the thought of that woman gets me in an uproar. Just mention her name and suddenly the same mouth that reduces trees to sawdust and pulverizes monsters begins gushing poetry. Beats anything I ever saw.

Experts will tell you that I’m a very lucky dog. I mean, it ain’t every dog that has the honor of falling in love with the most beautiful collie gal in the whole entire world. Even more experts would tell you how lucky SHE is.

Boy, is she lucky, but sometimes I wonder if she knows it. She keeps showing up with that bird dog. I just don’t understand . . . oh well. In my dreams she belongs to me. I don’t allow bird dogs into my dreams.

Anyways, me and Drover were under the gas tanks, melted and molded into our gunnysacks, and throwing up long lines of Z’s, when all of a sudden I heard Drover say, “Zebras wear pajamas but you can’t spot a leopard with a spyglass.”

Without opening my eyes or bringing myself to the Full Alert Mode, I ran that statement through my data banks. All at once, it didn’t make sense, so I lifted one ear to intercept any other transmissions, shall we say, from my pipsqueak assistant. Sure enough, I picked up another.

“There’s no pullybones in a chicken sandwich.”

This one made me suspicious, so I opened one eye. Drover appeared to be 100% asleep, yet he continued to transmit messages in a code I had never run across before. I listened.

“If you take the dog out of doggerel, the motor won’t start without peanut butter.”

Ah ha! A certain pattern began to emerge. I opened both eyes, cranked myself up to a sitting position, and listened more carefully. What I had originally taken to be the incoherent ramblings of Drover’s so-called mind were showing signs of being something else—perhaps coded messages from some magic source?

How else could you explain Drover’s use of a big word like “doggerel?” Or his reference to zebras and leopards and auto mechanics? I knew for a fact that Drover had never seen a zebra or a leopard, and I had reason to suspect that he didn’t know peanuts about starting motors.

Your ordinary dog would have dismissed it all as nonsense and gone back to sleep, but as you might have already surmised, I decided to probe this thing a little deeper. I moved closer and listened. He spoke again.

“When the sun rises in the morning in the east, the biscuits rise in the oven in the yeast.”

Hmm, yes. This message not only rhymed, but it also hinted at some deep, profoundical meaning. This transmission had to be originating from some mysterious source outside of Drover.

I decided to draw him out with a clever line of questions. It was risky. I mean, the sound of my voice might very well wake him up and spoil everything, but that was a risk I had to take.

What we had here was The Case of the Coded Transmission, and at last the clues were beginning to fall into place. Your ordinary dogs, your poodles and your cheewahwahs and your cocker spaniels, would miss all of the important stuff. I mean, it would go right over their heads like a duck out of water.

So there I was, sifting clues and finding patterns and preparing clever questions that would draw even more startling revelations from the mind of my sleeping assistant. As I said, it was a risky procedure but I had to give it a try.

“All right, Drover. You hear my voice, is that correct?”

“Mumbo jumbo.”

“Does that mean ‘yes’ in your secret code?”

“Jumbo mumbo.”

“Are you trying to reverse the code on me now?”

“Mumbo hocus pocus.”

“What happened to jumbo?”

“Jumbo hocus pocus.”

“Thought you could fool me, didn’t you? You should have known better. As I’ve often said, Drover, it isn’t the size of the dog in the fight that matters. It’s the size of the fog in the dog.”

“Foggy doggy mumbo jumbo.”

“Exactly. I’ve locked into your code now. You can hear my voice, Drover, and you will do exactly as I say. You will answer my questions . . . ”

“Gargle murgle guttersnipe.”

“. . . but not until I ask them. Stand by for the first question. Ready? Mark! Here is the first question: Give me the full name of the mysterious source of these messages.”

“Mumble grumble mutter.”

“You’re muttering, Drover, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Mumble grumble rumble.”

“That’s better. Is that the full name of the mysterious source of these messages?”

“Murgle gurgle snore zzzzzzzz.”

“Hmmm. Obviously he’s not from around here. That’s a foreign name if I ever heard one. Any name with that many Z’s in it is bound to be foreign.”

“Chicken feather jelly.”

“What? Repeat that message and concentrate on your diction.”

“Dictionary jelly murgle snore.”

“That’s better. All right, Drover, this brings us to our last and most important question, to the darkness behind the veil, so to speak. What is the evil purpose behind these coded messages sent to you from the mysterious foreign source?”

I held my breath and waited. Suddenly, the screen door slammed up at the house. Drover leaped to his feet. His eyes popped open, revealing . . .

Very little, actually. His ears were crooked, his eyes were crossed. He staggered two steps to the left and two steps to the right.

“Scraps!” he said in a squeaky voice.

“What? Is that the evil purpose of all these messages?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Answer the question.”

“Sally May just came out of the house. I bet she’s got some scraps from breakfast.”

“Huh?” At last it all fit together. “You’re exactly right, Drover. And speaking of evil purposes, un­less we do some fancy stepping, the cat will beat us to the scraps. Come on, Drover, to the yard gate!”

And so it was that, having solved The Case of the Coded Transmission, we turned to more serious business—delivering Pete the Barncat his first defeat of the day.