Читать книгу Moonlight Madness - John R. Erickson - Страница 6

Chapter One: Wicked Thoughts Exposed

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Have we ever discussed the time when Sally May invited her Sunday school class out to the ranch for a picnic?

Maybe not, but we should. It was a pretty strange day.

And did I mention Eddy the Rac? Maybe not. Well, he was a pretty interesting guy and he appeared on the ranch about this same time, just a couple of days before Sally May’s picnic.

But maybe we ought to start at the beginning. That’s the very best place to start a story, at the beginning.

Okay, let’s get organized.

It was Monday, as I recall, and it was also July. How could one day be both Monday and July? I don’t know, but it was, and Slim and Loper had spent the morning loading and stacking bales of hay in the . . . well, in the hay field, of course. Where else would you load and stack hay?

They had been hauling hay and they were tired and sweaty and they had come to the house for lunch, only lunch wasn’t quite ready. You see, Sally May had spent part of the morning talking on the phone. So the boys got out their ropes and started playing a game of Horse.

Have you ever played Horse with ropes and a roping dummy? I haven’t, but I’ve watched it several times. They’ve got this roping dummy, see, which is made out of scrap lumber. It has a kind of head with horns and two front legs made of two-by-fours, but the funny part is that it has only ONE back leg.

That’s correct, one back leg right in the middle, and Slim and Loper practiced their roping by tossing loops at the dummy. If one guy makes a catch, the second guy has to make the same catch. If he doesn’t, he gets one letter from the word “horse.” The first one to spell out the whole word loses the game.

I agree, it’s a pretty silly thing for two grown men to be doing, and it looks even sillier when their roping dummy has only three legs.

Think about it. The roping dummy is supposed to represent a calf, right? Would you care to guess how many tripod calves we have on this ranch? None. Zero. There are no three-legged calves on this outfit.

So why does their roping dummy have only three legs? I have my theories.

Theory #1: When they were building the dummy, they ran out of scrap lumber and weren’t able to finish the job right. Instead of going to the lumber yard and investing five bucks on some good lumber, they chose the Path of Leased Resistance and built a dummy that was a freak of nature.

Theory #2: When they were building the dummy, they had plenty of lumber but ran out of ambition. Perhaps the day was too hot or too cold. Perhaps their carpentry skills had been strained to the breaking point.

But for whatever reason, they figgered out that two back legs would take twice as long to build as one leg, so they cobbled up a three-legged roping dummy and justified it by saying, “Close enough for cowboy work.”

You can guess which theory I’d choose. Number Two. It sounds just like those guys. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. They’ll start a project that requires time and patience, and halfway through they begin to “short out,” so to speak. They get tired. They get bored. They start talking about all the other work that needs to be done.

And that’s where three-legged roping dummies come from.

Now, if I was running this ranch . . . but we needn’t get started on that subject. Nobody pays any attention to the Head of Ranch Security.

All they expect out of us is that we put in eighteen or twenty hours of work every day, with no comments or complaints or questions. After you’ve done that for ten or fifteen years, then they still won’t listen to you.

Anyways, they had dragged up their freakish three-legged roping dummy and were in the middle of a hot game of Horse. Loper had been making some pretty fancy hoolihan throws and Slim was behind with a score of H-O . . .

Just then, Sally May came out the back door. And when the screen door slammed, guess who suddenly appeared and came sprinting out of the iris patch—which, by the way, was supposed to be off-limits to ALL animals on the ranch.

Pete the Cheat.

Mister Greedy.

Mister Scrap Chaser.

Mister Never Satisfied with What He’s Given.

Mister Always Wants Another Handout.

He spends most of his life loafing and lurking in the flower beds, don’t you see, just waiting for Sally May to come out the back door with a plate of scraps.

The rest of us have jobs. We have to work for a living. Not Pete. He’s a full-time moocher and he lives for the moment when Sally May comes out the back door with table scraps.

Okay, maybe I sort of look forward to Scrap Time myself, but there’s a huge difference between my attitude and Pete’s. He’s greedy, whereas I merely want all the scraps.

That’s a huge difference.

I could probably tolerate Pete’s laziness and greediness if he had even a shred of humility about him. But he doesn’t. He thinks everyone loves him! He thinks he has a perfect right to come up and purr and rub and . . .

Have we discussed my views on cats? I really dislike them a lot.

So here came Pete, scampering out of the iris patch. By the time Sally May had stepped off the porch, he was trotting along beside her—looking up at her, meowing, purring, holding his tail straight up in the air, and trying to rub on her leg.

A neutral observer might have been fooled by this shameless display, might have thought that Pete was just being friendly and lovable. Hey, I knew exactly what he was up to. He was begging for scraps and waiting for a free handout.

I was outraged. Not only was this cat bothering my master’s wife and making a pest of himself, but he’d gotten a head start on ME.

See, I obeyed the law and stayed outside of Sally May’s yard. Her law was clear on this matter: “No animals inside the yard.” Yet Pete had built his shabby little career on cheating and violating the law, and somehow he always got by with it.

And I had to watch all of this from the other side of the fence—I being the Head of Ranch Security and the very embodiment of ranch law and order.

It was tough. I found myself getting restless, then angry. A snarl formed on my lips and a growl began to rumble in the dark cavern of my throat. My ears leaped upward into the Full Alert position and suddenly I noticed myself glaring daggers at this cat who was mocking a makery of our ranch’s system of law and order.

Sally May opened the gate and stepped out of the yard. The cat followed. Hmmm. Kitty had just, shall we say, moved into the range of my, uh, torpedoes and missiles. I lifted my eyes to see if Sally May . . .

Perhaps the growling had tipped my hand and revealed my darkest and most wicked thoughts. In any event, she seemed to know what was going through my mind.

Our eyes met. She leaned over and said, “Leave the cat alone.”

I stared at her in shock and disbelief. Me? Leave the . . . I hadn’t even . . . what made her . . . how could she . . .

I made a mental note to myself: “Next time we’re arming the torpedoes, we should observe silence. Growling seems to alert suspicion.”

Not that I had actually intended to . . . Sally May was a pretty shrewd observer, and yes, it appeared that I would have to be more secretive in planning my, uh, military adventures.

I whapped my tail on the gravel and gave her my most sincere wounded look: “Sally May, there’s been some mistake. You’ve got me figgered all wrong.”

She continued to look down at me. “Hank, I know you. Your thoughts are written all over your face in neon lights. You can’t fool me.”

Well, I . . . neon lights, huh? My goodness, I would have to do some work on my face, it ap­peared, although I hadn’t actually . . .

She turned her attention to Slim and Loper. I turned my attention to the cat—curled my lips, showed him some fangs, glared ice picks at him, and unleashed a low rumbling growl.

She thumped me in the ribs with the heel of her shoe. “Hank!”

Good grief, did she have eyes in the back of her head? She wasn’t even looking at me! How did she . . .

Okay, it must have been the growl. That thing was getting me in a lot of trouble, and yes, I would have to spend some time polishing my Silent Operations.

“Boys,” she said to Slim and Loper, “I’ve finally got the picnic planned for Wednesday morning. Loper, I’d like for you to watch the kids, and Slim, maybe you could find us a nice picnic spot along the creek. Can you remember that, Slim?”

“Oh sure. It’s branded in my memory with a hot iron.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll call you Tuesday night, just to be sure the iron was hot. Well, let’s eat, boys.”

She didn’t have to call ’em twice. They dropped their ropes and went trooping toward the house. As they passed me, I looked at them and gave them Extra Sincere Wags, just in case they might . . . you never know when somebody might invite you into the house for, well, lunch or something.

That deal fell like a gutted sparrow, but the morning wasn’t a total loss. On the way to the house, Slim got his feet tangled up in Pete and stepped on his tail.

“Reeeeeeeeer!”

Ha ha, hee hee, ho ho. I loved it. And around two o’clock that afternoon, Slim and I prevented a murder from happening.