Читать книгу The Case of the Buried Deer - John R. Erickson - Страница 7

Chapter Two: Drover Robs a Train

Sorry for all the confusion. It won’t happen again, not on my watch.

Show me a dog that sleeps his life away and I’ll show you a mutt that never solves a case.

Okay, Drover and I rushed to the screen door, assuming that Slim would be holding it open for us. Hey, dogs want to see rain just as much as people do, right? But the door was closed, so I gave it a shove with my…BONK…with my nose, but that didn’t work out so well. Ouch.

Behind me, Drover said, “It’s closed.”

“No kidding? I hardly noticed—as I bashed my nose into it. Why don’t you try to be helpful and nose it open yourself?”

“With my nose?”

I melted him with a glare. “Do you think you can nose it open with your ear?”

“I never thought about that.”

“Well, think about it. It’s impossible to nose open a door with anything but a nose.”

“How come?”

“Because…because that’s just the way things work in the Real World. Have you ever thought of joining the Real World?”

“Oh, I’m kind of busy right now.”

“Yes, I saw how busy you were—sleeping on the job and slurping your duty.”

“You mean shirking?”

“What?”

“You said I was slurping my duty, but I think you meant shirking.”

I could feel my temper rising. “I said you were slurping on the job and sleeping your duty! I can’t make it any plainer than that. Ten Chicken Marks for slurping your duty.”

“Oh drat.”

“Now open the nose with your door.”

“Yeah, but by doze is stobbed ubb.”

“Does anyone care if your doze is stobbed ub?”

“I guess not.”

“Nobody cares, so scratch on the screen with your foot.”

“Well, this old leg’s been giving me fits.”

“Never mind, get out of the way.”

I shoved him aside, faced the door, and began warming up the muscles in my enormous shoulders. This obstinate door was blocking our path to the porch and our Nose-Opening Procedures had failed. Slim needed to be informed that we were trapped inside the house, and I had no choice but to do Paw Scrapes on the screen.

I placed my right front paw on the screen, hit the Activate Claws button, and pulled my foot downward in a downward direction.

Skritch!

That got his attention. “Hey, meathead, quit scratching my screen door!”

Well, open it!

“We ain’t living in a boxcar.”

I never said we were living in a boxcar.

“If you shred up my screen, guess who has to replace it. Me.”

Boy, he sure gets bent out of shape over nothing.

“It wouldn’t hurt if you learned a few manners.”

Sigh.

“I guess you want out.”

Of course I wanted out! Why else would a dog scratch the screen?

At last, he appeared. Through the screen and in the gloom of morning, he looked…well, awful, what else can you say? Naked except for a pair of boxer shorts, bony, as pale as mayonnaise, and a buzzard’s nest of hair on top of his head.

Just for a moment, he reminded me of…well, Frankincense, the famous monster. Deep in my heart, I knew that he couldn’t possibly…on the other hand…yipes, he sure looked like Frankincense, and I mean down to the last grizzly detail!

You know, one of the things we learn in Security Work is that the world can be a very strange place, and we have to force ourselves to exercise caution. I mean, weird things happen all the time, and just because I thought this guy was Slim Chance didn’t mean…

Just to be on the safe side, I took a step backward and fired off a bark. It drew a rapid response.

“Dry up, will you?”

Okay, it was Slim. Whew.

He jerked open the door. “House-wrecker.”

I squirted through the gap and wasn’t surprised when he kicked me with his bare foot. It didn’t hurt, but…well, it seemed undignified. What kind of world are we living in when the Head of Ranch Security gets a kick in the pants for wanting to share Porch Time with his master? It seemed a sad state of affairs.

Oh, and by the way, Drover managed to slither outside without getting kicked. I don’t know how he always…oh well.

I sat down on the edge of the porch, as far away from Mister Grump as I could get. I turned my back on him too. He didn’t deserve the companionship of a dog, and I wasn’t sure we would ever be friends again.

The rain made a steady sizzle on the tin roof, and my goodness, the air smelled wonderful—fresh, damp, heavy with the aroma of sagebrush and old leaves and new grass that was trying to green up. During a drought, we forget how good the world can smell when it gets a drink.

We sat on the porch for a while, listening to the soft rain and breathing in the delicious air and watching daylight creep over the eastern sky. Drover was sitting nearby, and I noticed that he wore a silly grin on his mouth.

“What are you grinning about?”

“Me? Oh, nothing much.”

“I’m sure that’s true, but when someone grins on this ranch, I need to know what’s going on.”

“Well, I had a crazy dream.”

“Oh? Then we needn’t waste any more time. I’m not interested in your dreams.”

“Thanks. I dreamed I was a famous astronaut, flying through space in a saddle-up.”

“In a saddle-up?”

“Yeah, one of those things they launch into space.”

I heaved a sigh. “Drover, get it right. If you were flying through space, it was in a satellite, which has nothing to do with a saddle.”

“They sound the same.”

“They’re not the same.”

“Well, mine had a saddle.”

“Okay, your satellite had a saddle, and I have no interest in hearing the rest of your dream.”

He gave me a sly grin. “I haven’t gotten to the good part. I robbed a train.”

“You robbed a train? In outer space?”

“Yeah, it was a whole train-load of bananas!”

I stared into the vast emptiness of his gaze. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this. In the first place, it’s ridiculous. If someone were listening to this conversation, he’d think we’re just a couple of goofballs. In the second place, that wasn’t your dream, it was MINE!”

“Gosh, you mean…”

“Stop butting into my dreams! Find your own.”

“Hee hee hee.”

“And don’t giggle in the miggle of my lecture!”

“If that was your dream, you were asleep! Hee hee. I caught you!”

Huh?

I paced to the edge of the porch and gazed off into the distance. Many thoughts tramped across the parade ground of my mind. “Drover, in your own sneaking, slithering way, you’ve exposed a shameful truth about the Security Division. We both slept when we should have been guarding the house. Let’s try to put it behind us. Agreed?”

“Okay, but what about my Chicken Marks?”

I marched back to him and laid a paw upon his shoulder. “I’ll handle that. Nobody will ever know. Now, let’s shape up and try to do better.”

Pretty touching, huh? You bet. Our human friends have no idea how hard we strive to be good dogs. Sometimes we fail, but we’re never content with failure. We just have to pick ourselves up and march onward, knowing that…well, if we mess up again, we won’t tell anyone.

The somber mood of this occasion was suddenly shattered by Slim’s voice. “The dadgum rain quit!”

I had been so distracted by departmental business, I hadn’t noticed this crucial detail. I lifted Earatory Scanners and sure enough, our instruments confirmed that the rain had stopped.

A shiver passed through my biver…through my body, let us say. Why the shiver? Because I knew that Slim would be mad or half-mad for the rest of the day, and the job of cheering him up would fall squarely on us—his dogs.