Moonlight Madness Read online

  Moonlight Madness

  John R. Erickson

  Illustrations by Gerald L. Holmes

  Maverick Books, Inc.

  Publication Information

  MAVERICK BOOKS

  Published by Maverick Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 549, Perryton, TX 79070

  Phone: 806.435.7611

  www.hankthecowdog.com

  First published in the United States of America by Gulf Publishing Company, 1994.

  Subsequently published simultaneously by Viking Children’s Books and Puffin Books, members of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1999.

  Currently published by Maverick Books, Inc., 2013.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © John R. Erickson, 1994

  All rights reserved

  Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-123-0

  Hank the Cowdog® is a registered trademark of John R. Erickson.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Dedication

  To Annie Love, my twelfth-grade English teacher, who said, “I love your poems—write me some more.”

  Contents

  Chapter One Wicked Thoughts Exposed

  Chapter Two A Gang of Hoodlums on the Ranch

  Chapter Three I Teach the Thugs a Valuable Lesson

  Chapter Four Eddy the Rac

  Chapter Five Ignoring the Coon

  Chapter Six The Phony Elevator

  Chapter Seven Conned by a Coon

  Chapter Eight Laughed At by All My Friends

  Chapter Nine Laying Down the Law to Eddy the Rac

  Chapter Ten This Is Pretty Weird, So Hang On

  Chapter Eleven Freedom for the Cookies

  Chapter Twelve A Happy Ending Except That Slim Got Caught Up a Tree

  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 friendl
y 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.

  Chapter Two: A Gang of Hoodlums on the Ranch

  Whilst the cowboy crew were stuffing themselves with Sally May’s roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, fresh peas, radishes and lettuce from the garden, creamed corn, and hot apple cobbler—whilst they were doing all that, I Who Had Not Been Invited maintained my virgil at the yard gate.

  I mean, somebody on the ranch had to WORK while everybody else was eating and gorging and stuffing themselves. My work consisted mainly of guarding the gate against intruders and laughing at Pete for getting his tail stepped on.

  Oh yes, and there was the wasp, the yellowjacket wasp, who buzzed around my head for a while and then landed on the ground nearby. I couldn’t think of a single reason why he needed to be there, and so I set out to rid the ranch of . . .

  A guy tends to forget that there’s a difference between flies and yellowjackets. You can get rid of a fly by snatching him out of the air and biting down on him, but if you use that same tactic on a wasp, he will sometimes sting you on the lips or tongue.

  Both are flying insects and you’d think that the same procedure would work as well for one as for the other. That’s not the case, and . . .

  Anyways, I waited patiently at the gate. I was counting the throbs in my wounded tongue when, at last, the back door opened and the cowboys came out, rubbing their bellies and growling with satisfaction.

  At the gate, they paused to make their plans for the afternoon’s work. Loper would stay at headquarters and do some welding in the machine shed while Slim checked windmills and put out salt blocks.

  Welding didn’t interest me at all, and hanging around the machine shed, a guy could get himself involved with wasps. I never mess around with wasps. Hence, I followed Slim down to the china­berry grove, where he had parked the flatbed pickup in the shade.

  I would help him check windmills and put out salt. Or so I thought. I never dreamed that we would get ourselves involved in . . . well, you’ll see.

  We pulled around to the cake house and loaded ten blocks of salt onto the pickup bed. Then we headed east on the Wolf Creek road. I noticed that Slim was getting drowsy in the heat. His eyelids were drooping. I barked and that woke him up, but then he glared at me and muttered, “Don’t bark in the cab or I’ll throw you out of here.”

  Well, ex-cuse me! All I’d done was kept him from falling asleep at the wheel and saved us from being smashed and killed in a terrible accident, is all I’d done. But did I get any credit for saving our lives? Oh no.

  Once I’d barked him awake, he started singing to keep himself awake. It almost made me regret . . . no, listening to him sing was better than getting smushed in a wreck. Here’s how it went.

  The Cowboy’s Transfusion

  There was an old cowboy who lived all alone in a shack in a state of confusion.

  He felt pretty bad and went to the doc who gave him a total transfusion.

  He laid on the table and thought of his woes, till the bottle of blood came up empty.

  Then he leaped to the floor and yelled to the doc, “I feel like I’m eighteen or twenty!”

  When he went to the desk to pay for this deal, he decided to double the fee.

  He wrote ’em a check for three hundred bucks. “A heck of a bargain,” said he.

  And back at the ranch he flew into work like a demon possessed with ambition,

  Built ten miles of fence, hauled nine loads of hay, and bucked all his broncs to submission.

  He did all his work and then he got bored, he couldn’t seem to relax.

  When he tried to sit down, he just couldn’t do it because of those energy attacks.

  So he went back to town, got a ticket for speedin’ and ran his old truck through a rail.

  By sundown he’d got in three fights in a bar and the police had took him to jail.

  So he called up the doctor who’d cured his old age and got him in such of a mess.

  He asked ’bout that stuff they’d put in his bod, and then the doctor confessed.

  “There’s been a mistake, you got diesel, not blood. No wonder
it’s turned to a wreck.

  We’ll make you a deal and give your blood back . . . just as soon as you fix that hot check!”

  Hmmm. Well, that was okay, I guessed, if it kept Slim awake and kept me from being smeared all over the dash. But as for it being a great musical experience . . . it wasn’t.

  Well, we were toodling along the Wolf Creek road when all of a sudden . . . holy smokes, the screech of brakes, and I went flying into the dash and almost into the ashtray which was full of stale cigar butts.

  We slid to a stop in the middle of the road. Slim looked out his window at . . . something. I picked myself up off the floorboard and heard him say, “Huh. There’s a dead coon. Looks like she got run over in the night.”

  I rushed to the window to see for myself, which required that I, well, stand in his lap. Sure enough, there was the . . .

  He pushed me away. “Hank, have I told you lately that you stink?”

  Well, yes, as a matter of fact. We had discussed that hateful rumor on several occasions and had decided that there was no truth to it whatsoever. None. Just a pack of vicious lies.

  And Slim didn’t smell so great himself, and people who live in grass huts shouldn’t throw stones.

  Strike matches.

  There’s something they shouldn’t do, and therefore they shouldn’t do it.

  If he didn’t want me to stand in his lap, why didn’t he just come out and say so? He didn’t need to hurl lies and insults at me.

  Dogs have feelings too.

  We were about to drive away from the scene, when all at once we heard barking. I heard it. Slim heard it. But I heard it first. We looked off to the north, toward a grove of chinaberry trees on the west side of the creek.

  Two dogs stood at the base of the tree. Three dogs. And they were looking up into the tree and barking at something. Four dogs, actually, my goodness, a whole pack of dogs, and I knew at once that they were not local ranch dogs.

  The dogs in our neighborhood don’t run in packs. We ranch dogs know better. Packs of dogs almost always get into big trouble, and we’re talking about killing chickens and sheep and chasing cattle around the pasture.