Читать книгу The Case of the Secret Weapon - John R. Erickson - Страница 6

Chapter One: A Bed Has One Foot but No Legs

It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The adventure began in July, as I recall. Yes, it was the Fourth of July, and Drover and I were spending a few days at Slim’s bachelor shack on the banks of Wolf Creek.

Normally, we work out of our bedroom/office under the gas tanks at Ranch Headquarters, but now and then we enjoy hanging out at Slim’s place. For one thing, he has no cats, so the Nuisance Factor drops to zero. That’s a big plus right there. It’s common knowledge that 87 percent of all the problems in this world are caused by cats. No cats, no problems.

For another thing, Slim is a bachelor cowboy, a generous soul who doesn’t mind letting his dogs stay inside the house. In fact, I think he enjoys having us around. He’s the kind of man who talks to his dogs and sometimes he even shares his supper with us. Slim’s suppers aren’t always a great experience (he eats a lot of canned mackerel sandwiches), but show me a man who talks to his dogs, and I’ll show you a man with refined taste and deep intelligence.

But the point is that Drover and I were spending the night at Slim’s place, stretched out on the living room floor. Or let’s put it this way. We started the night stretched out on the living room floor, but sometime in the early morning hours . . .

His carpet was old and thin, don’t you see, and after several hours, I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. I tried to scratch up a soft spot, but threadbare carpet doesn’t offer much in the scratching-up department.

At that point, I did what any normal, healthy American dog would have done. I crept down the long hallway to Slim’s bedroom and . . . well, checked out the accommodations, let us say. See, Slim slept in a bed and beds are pretty nice places to, uh, spend a long night. Heh heh.

Hovering beside the bed in the inky black ink of the darkness, I lifted my ears and took a reading on Earatory Scanners. I heard . . . you know, my first thought was that someone had driven a truck into the house, but that didn’t make sense. I took another reading and came up with a more reasonable answer.

Slim was snoring. Yes, he was a champion snorer, and that’s what he was doing. Good. If he was snoring, he was asleep. Heh heh. This gave me the signal to begin a procedure we call Enter the Bed.

It’s a pretty complicated procedure, and most of your ordinary mutts wouldn’t take the time to do it. They’ll just go blundering into the bed and hope for the best, but what usually happens is that the dog gets yelled at and sent out of the room.

Not me, fellers. I take the time to do it right. By George, if you can’t do it right, with patience and loving care, you shouldn’t do it at all.

Here’s the procedure. You might want to take some notes.

Okay, you start by placing one paw on the bed. I prefer the right front paw, but the left front might work just as well. You place it on the bed, press down, and wait for a response. If you get no response, you move deeper into the program, placing the other front paw on the bed.

This is where it gets complicated. You have to transfer all the weight of your body from your back legs, which are still on the floor, to your front legs, which are in position on the bed. This step in the procedure works better if you have a set of enormous muscular shoulders, and I do.

In the Weight Transfer Sequence, you shift all your weight from back legs to front legs, lift the hind legs off the floor, and give them a soft landing on the surface of the bed. If the mission has to be scrubbed, it will usually come at this crucial point, when your full weight is balanced on the edge of the bed.

It was a very tense moment. I activated Ear­atory Scanners and studied the monitor that showed Slim’s heartbeat, breathing patterns, and brain waves. All the signs appeared to be normal. But then . . .

This came as a shock. Just as everything appeared to be normal, Slim hiccupped in his sleep! HICK! No kidding. It came as such a surprise, I almost canceled the mission. I mean, normal people don’t hiccup in their sleep, do they?

Well, Slim did and you can put that one into the record books. It almost wrecked the mission, but I managed to keep control of things. I stood my ground and didn’t move a hair, and Slim went back to his normal snoring pattern.

Whew! That was a close call.

At that point, I went into Stealthy Creep and began inching my way . . . huh? Holy smokes, in the deep darkness at the foot of Slim’s bed, I encountered some kind of creature . . . a carbon-based life-form . . . something with hair and a doggish odor!

I froze. Every hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. Who could it be? A stray dog from town? A prowling coyote that had somehow managed to break into Slim’s house and crawl into his bed? I did a quick search of our databases, looking for the names of anyone I might want to encounter on Slim’s bed in the middle of the night.

My search turned up nothing. There was absolutely nobody that I wanted to meet at this particular time and place.

So what does a guy do in this situation? Run? Attack? Bark? I was in the process of weighing these options when I heard a voice in the darkness. “Oh, hi. What are you doing here?”

I melted with relief. I mean, you’ve seen what happens to ice cream on a blistering hot day, right? That was me. All the muscles in my highly conditioned body released their tension, and I became a puddle of a doglike substance.

Can you guess who it was? Drover. I didn’t know whether to be sad, mad, or glad. After a moment of brittle silence, I whispered, “What are you doing here, you little sneak?”

“Well . . . I couldn’t sleep on that hard floor.”

“What? That’s ridiculous! Drover, we are the elite troops of the ranch’s Security Division, and we sleep wherever we fall at the end of the day.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t figure Slim would mind if I borrowed part of his bed. It’s a pretty nice bed.”

“Of course it’s a nice bed, but it’s not for dogs.”

“I’ll be derned. What are you doing here?”

There was a moment of silence. “I was conducting a routine patrol of the promises.”

“You mean the premises?”

“What?”

“You said you promised to parole the premises.”

“That’s correct, and in the process of doing that, I caught you trespassing on Slim’s bed. Drover, I ought to throw the book at you! Do you have any idea what would happen if Slim woke up and caught us here?”

“Reckon he’d be mad?”

“Course he would. At the very least, he’d kick us out of bed. At the worst, he might throw us out of the house. Is that what you want, to become a homeless waif?”

“Well, I sure like cookies.”

“What?”

“I like cookies.”

“Yes, and so what? Everyone likes cookies.”

“Well, you said something about vanilla wafers.”

I took a slow breath of air and searched for patience. “Drover, I said ‘homeless waif,’ not vanilla wafer. A waif is not a cookie.”

“Yeah, I think about ’em all the time. I even dream about cookies.”

I stuck my nose in his face. “Stop talking about cookies. The point is that you’re taking up my space on Slim’s bed.”

“Gosh, you mean . . .”

“Yes. The Head of Ranch Security needs a good night’s sleep.”

“Well, there’s plenty of room. Maybe we could share. I promise to be good.”

I gave that some thought. “I suppose it might work. We’ll curl up at the foot of the bed.”

I heard him giggle. “Foot of the bed. That’s a funny way to put it.”

“What’s funny?”

“Well, how can a bed have a foot if it doesn’t have a leg?”

“Drover, if a bed has a foot, it must have a leg.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. What’s your point?”

“Well, a table has four legs but no feet. A bed has one foot and no legs. Somehow that doesn’t make sense.”

“Look, pal, you can either make sense or sleep on the bed. Which will it be?”

“Well . . . sleep, I guess, but I still say . . .”

“Hush. Shut your little trap and go to sleep.”

Whew. At last he shut his trap. I curled up at the foot of the bed and went . . . you know what? I couldn’t sleep—because I couldn’t stop thinking about Drover’s ridiculous question: How can a bed have a foot if it doesn’t have a leg to stand on?

You see what he does to me? In my deepest heart, I DIDN’T CARE, but I couldn’t slink a wick all nerp and . . . swamping honk the snickle­fritzzzzzzzzz . . .