The Case of the Secret Weapon Read online

  The Case of the Secret Weapon

  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 Viking Children’s Books and Puffin Books, members of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2010.

  Currently published by Maverick Books, Inc., 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © John R. Erickson, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-155-1

  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 George and Karen

  Contents

  Chapter One A Bed Has One Foot but No Legs

  Chapter Two Morning at Slim’s Shack

  Chapter Three Slim Sits on the Porch in His Shorts

  Chapter Four The Robber

  Chapter Five Slim Goes to the Picnic

  Chapter Six A Mysterious Visitor

  Chapter Seven The Secret Weapon

  Chapter Eight False Alarm

  Chapter Nine Kangaroos Are Marsh Soup Eels

  Chapter Ten Terrible Damage to My Nose

  Chapter Eleven My Wicked Plan for Plato’s Future

  Chapter Twelve A Very Dramatic Ending, Wow!

  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 . . .

  Chapter Two: Morning at Slim’s Shack

  Okay, maybe I finally dozed off and managed to bag a few hours’ sleep on Slim’s bed. It was exactly the kind of peaceful sleep every loyal dog dreams about and deserves. But let the record show that I don’t care why a bed has a foot but no legs.

  I awoke sometime after dawn, lifted my head, and glanced around. Fresh morning light poured through the open window, and I heard the gobble of wild turkeys outside, a sure sign of a new day. Turkeys gobble and twitter in the morning when they leave their roost, don’t you see, and then they go trudging off to work, pecking seeds and chasing grasshoppers.

  I opened my jaws, threw a curl into my tongue, and was about to pull in a big yawn of fresh air when I noticed the head and face of a man, right beside me. I looked closer and was able to put a name with the face.

  It was Slim Chance, a friend of mine. In fact, he was the guy who owned the bed.

  I wasn’t surprised to find him in his own bed, but you might have already picked up an interesting clue. I had gone to sleep at his feet but had awakened beside his face. In other words, sometime in the night, the bed had reversed itself, and that was pretty amazing.

  You’d think that I would have noticed. I mean, Slim was a pretty big man and . . .

  Wait. There was another explanation. Sleeping beside the master’s face is the kind of thing a loyal dog sometimes does without thinking about it or even knowing about it. I mean, we care so deeply about our people that we just want to be close to them, and the deeper we care, the closer we want to be.

  And soft pillows are kind of nice, too. Hee hee.

  The problem is that . . . well, our people don’t always appreciate having a sleeping dog in their faces. I had a feeling that Slim wouldn’t be thrilled to find me sharing his pillow, and we sure didn’t need to start a new day with him half-asleep and mad.

  In other words, I needed to make a graceful exit before he woke up and caught me sleeping on his pillow.

  I began creeping backward, away from the pillow, past his rib cage and bony knees, and down to the region where his feet lived. There, I tapped a paw on the sleeping Drover and whispered, “Return to base!”

  He glanced around, blinked his eyes, and nodded, and together we slithered off the foot of the bed and tiptoed down the long hallway. When Slim emerged from his bedroom two hours later (it was a holiday, so he slept late), the entire Security Division was curled up asleep on the threadbare carpet.

  Heh heh. Old Slim never suspected a thing, although he did mutter something about “sleeping crooked” and having a crick in his neck.

  It’s always interesting to watch Slim first thing in the morning. I mean, he moves like someone who is half-blind, half-dead, and walking underwater. Here he came, creeping down the hall in his boxer shorts and a T-shirt, dragging his feet across the floor while his left hand felt its way along the wall. His eyes were red-rimmed and half-shut, his hair was down in his eyes, and he had pillow tracks on one side of his face.

  He finally made it to the living room, but he didn’t speak to us. At this time of day, he rarely speaks. If he tries to establish any kind of communication, it takes the form of grunting sounds, but on this particular morning, he didn’t even bother to grunt a greeting.

  Sliding his bare feet across the floor and holding one hand out in front of him, he made his way into the kitchen and headed straight for the device that would bring him out of the vapors—a pan of water that sat on one of the burners of his propane cookstove.

  A lot of people make coffee in a coffeepot or an electric perpetrator . . . perpenator . . . what’s the word I’m searching for? PERCOLATOR, there we go, an electric coffee percolator. Not Slim. He has nothing but scorn for such modern devices. He boils his coffee in a pan of water.

  Why? Because that’s The Cowboy Way. He calls it “campfire coffee,” honest coffee made over an honest fire.

  With awkward, sleep-numbed fingers, he turned on the gas, struck a match, and held it to the stove burner. The match blew out, so he struck another match and poked it under the pan.

  This produced a small explosion. See, if you leave a stove burner going for ten or fifteen seconds and then add a lighted match, the propane fumes will say POOF! How do I know? I’ve seen him do it a hundred times, and you know what? It always makes a little explosion, and it always seems to surprise him.

  Well, once he had the fire going under the pan of water, he felt his way across the cabinets above the sink until he found the same big red can of coffee he’d used the day before, in exactly the same spot on the shelf.

  Most people would use a measuring spoon to transfer the ground-up coffee into the pan. Slim dumps it. Sometimes he gets the right amount with one dump, but sometimes it takes two or three. This time, he used one dump and two sprinkles, but the importan
t thing is that even when he’s half-asleep, he has an idea in his mind of how much coffee is just the right amount—and he doesn’t need a measuring spoon to do it.

  Once he had finished the Coffee Dump, he began the next phase: waiting for the water to boil. It always gets funny here, because he HATES to wait for water to boil. There he stood, blinking his soggy eyes, yawning, shuffling his feet, shaking his head, and muttering under his breath.

  After a while, the water hissed and boiled, and the excitement started to build. He could smell the coffee now, and his eyes began to open up. He waited, watched, shook the pan, and at exactly the right moment, he pulled it off the stove and poured the steaming liquid into a big brown mug.

  He lifted the mug to his nose, took a deep sniff, slurped down his first gulp, and growled, “Oh yeah, there it is! Let the day begin!” At that point, he spit out some coffee grounds and was ready to face the world.

  Walking with bolder steps now, and without leaning against a wall, he made his way into the living room and spoke his first words to us. “Dogs, the master of the house has just arrove.”

  Drover and I exchanged glances. What were we supposed to do?

  “Y’all could show a little more excitement.”

  I thumped my tail on the floor, and Drover wiggled his stub tail. If Slim expected more than that . . . well, too bad.

  He scowled. “A man gets no respect these days, even from his dogs.” He took another swig of coffee. “Hey, today’s the Fourth of July. I’ve got the whole day off, and I can do whatever I want. And you know what I’m going to do?”

  He seemed to be talking to me, so I went to the telegraph key of my tail and tapped out a reply. “No. What are you going to do?”

  He winked. “I’m going to spend my day just like the rich and famous. I’m going to sit out on the porch in my underwear, drink coffee, and loaf. What do you think of that, pooch?”

  I tapped out another reply. “That sounds pretty exciting. No doubt you’ll need our help, so we’ll go with you.”