The Case of the Black-Hooded Hangmans Read online

  The Case of the Black-Hooded Hangmans

  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, 1995.

  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, 1995

  All rights reserved

  Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-124-7

  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 my favorite newlyweds, Scot and Tiffany Erickson

  Contents

  Chapter One If a Flea Can Flee, Can a Flea Fly?

  Chapter Two Caution: Toxic Sawdust Cornbread

  Chapter Three Drover’s Reward and the Ultra-Crypto Secret Code

  Chapter Four Eddy’s Magic Trick

  Chapter Five The Perfect Crime

  Chapter Six Me? Sit on the Nest?

  Chapter Seven Saved by My Little Pal

  Chapter Eight Yikes! A Haunted House!

  Chapter Nine I Enter the Haunted House

  Chapter Ten The Black-Hooded Hangmans in the Loft

  Chapter Eleven This Chapter Will Give You the Shivers, No Kidding

  Chapter Twelve Famous Heroes for Sure!

  Chapter One: If a Flea Can Flee, Can a Flea Fly?

  It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Do you remember Eddy the raccoon? We called him Eddy the Rac for short, and he caused nothing but trouble from the first day he arrived on the ranch.

  He was an orphan, see. His ma got run over on the county road. Slim the Cowboy found him up in a tree and took him home to raise.

  I knew that was a bad idea. I could have told ’em but nobody asked my opinion. Who am I, after all? I’m merely the Head of Ranch Security, the guy who runs this ranch day after day and night after night, the guy who puts his life on the line to protect it from monsters and so forth.

  And from coons, who are very destructive. If you want the inside story on coons, ask a Head of Ranch Security. If not for us, the coons would have taken over years ago. They would have stolen all the feed out of the feed barn, all the machines out of the machine shed, and all the corn out of the corn patch.

  Oh yes, and all the eggs out of the chicken house, but that happens to be a sensitive subject and I’m not sure I want to talk about it.

  Yes, I’d had lots of experience in dealing with Eddy’s kinfolks, and I knew for a fact that coons weren’t nice guys. But what was I supposed to do when Slim brought Eddy home and decided to make a pet of him?

  All at once we had this little con artist on the place and I had strict orders to be nice to him. Okay, so I went out of my way to be nice to him. What did it get me? You’ll see.

  But I’ll give you a little hint. It was Eddy who led us to the Haunted House which happened to be full of . . . I don’t want to scare anybody, so hang on.

  Maybe I shouldn’t even mention it. It’s too scary.

  Oh, maybe you can handle it. We’ll give it a shot. It was full of BLACK-HOODED HANGMANS! Pretty scary, huh? I warned you.

  Anyways, where were we? I guess it was in the winter, late January or early February. It was cold and snowy. Gloomy weather. Eddy had been living with us for several months, as I recall, and had broken all records for making mischief.

  See, he had a real talent for thinking up mischief and luring me into his schemes. Then, after the mischief was done, he would disappear, and guess who always got caught. And blamed. And yelled at and scolded.

  Me.

  Well, you can fool Hank the Cowdog once in a row and you can also fool him twice in a row, if you’re pretty clever, and sometimes even four or five times in a row.

  Maybe that’s hard for you to believe, that a rinky-dink little raccoon could fool the Head of Ranch Security many times in a row. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but he did. I admit it.

  But let me hasten to add that I had learned valuable lessons on the subject of coons:

  1.Never believe anything a coon tells you.

  2.Never take advice from one.

  3.And above all, never ever help one escape from his cage in the middle of the night.

  Yes, I had been to school on coons, and the experience had made me a stronger, wiser, more mature dog. The chances that I would ever be fooled again by a raccoon had shrunk down to zero, or below zero.

  All right, so it was a brittle cold evening toward the end of January. Eddy the Rac was camped in his cage in front of the machine shed, and as I recall, he was asleep.

  Yes, of course he was because that’s typical coon behavior. They fall asleep around six o’clock in the evening, and then when everybody else is ready to hit the gunnysack, they’re wide awake and ready to play.

  Eddy was racked out. A little play on words there. Get it? Eddy the Rac was racked out, which means asleep. Pretty good, huh? I get a kick out of . . .

  What was I talking about? Oh yes, cornbread. Sally May had pitched out a few slices of week-old cornbread with the evening scraps. Drover and I raced for them, and naturally, I won.

  I won the cornbread and then proceeded to . . . well, choke and cough, if you must know the truth. Cornbread is very dry. Week-old cornbread is even drier than fresh. I wolfed it down, just as I might have gobbled meat or regular bread or any one of your other food groups.

  Wolfing cornbread is a bad idea. Never wolf cornbread. It’s made of tiny particles, don’t you see, and they are dry and they can get caught in your . . . whatever.

  Your windbag. Your breathing pore. The hole your air goes through when you take a breath. We call it the Coffus Makus for reasons which are too complicated to explain.

  Oh well, I’ll try, even though it’s very very technical and scientific. See, in Security Work we have to use a lot of technical terms. Your ordinary dogs can’t handle the big words and the huge concepts, so they rarely use them.

  Heads of Ranch Security, on the other hand . . .

  How did we get on the subject of cornbread? I thought we were discussing raccoons.

  Hmmmm. Very strange.

  I mean, once I get locked in on a subject matter, I’m like a heat-seeking guided mistletoe. I go straight to the target and virtually destroy it in a blaze of wit and logic and so forth, and very seldom do I get distracted from my primary mission.

  Your ordinary run of mutts have a hard time finishing a sentence or completing a thought. Too many distractions. Drover is a perfect example. His mind is always wandering: to the clouds, to a butterfly, to a flea crawling around on his . . .

  You won’t believe this, but at this very moment, I m
ean, even as we speak, a flea is crawling around on my . . . tee hee . . . crawling up my left hind leg. It tickles. I mean, it REALLY tickles, and if it weren’t for Iron Discipline, I would probably . . .

  Hee hee, ha ha, ho ho!

  We’re talking about Serious Tickles here, fellers, and I may have to break off in a minute and go to Countermeasures. I’d rather not because I want to finish the business about the cornbread, and once I’ve opened up a subject for discussion, I hate to . . .

  Ho! Hee! Ha!

  This is tough, but let me try to mush on. See, I gobbled down the cornbread and I can’t stand this anymore. I’ve got to do something about that stupid flea.

  Hang on.

  I’ll be right back.

  Chew chew chew!

  Gnaw gnaw gnaw!

  Bite bite bite!

  Chew gnaw bite!

  Gnaw bite chew!

  Chew bite gnaw!

  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

  Say good-bye to the flea, for he hath gone to the place where fleas go when they have messed around with the wrong dog.

  I hate fleas. Fleas and flies. They’re worthless and they drive me nuts.

  What Good Is a Flea or a Fly?

  What good is a flea or a fly?

  What good is a fly or a flea?

  If you flick at a fly, it will try to flee,

  If you flick at a flea, it will try to fly,

  But won’t.

  See, a fly can flee, ’cause a fly can fly,

  ’Cause a fly has wings and that is why

  A fly can flee as well as fly,

  But a flea can only try to fly.

  Whatever.

  A flea can hop or hope to fly,

  A fly can fly or hope to hop,

  But neither can do them both at once,

  And I can’t tell you why.

  Don’t you see?

  If a fly can fly and a flea can flee,

  You’d think that a flea could fly.

  Well, maybe it can, I’m getting confused,

  And who really cares? Not me.

  Good-bye.

  Pretty good, huh? I get a kick out of messing around with words and poetry and stuff, and you’ll be proud to know that I got rid of the flea, which brings us back to the important subject we were . . .

  What were we discussing? Huh. It just vanished. Had it right on the tip of my tongue, so to speak, but then . . .

  The sunset? Maybe that was it. We had a pretty sunset that evening. We have one every evening but some are prettier than others. This one had lots of pink and orange in it, but that’s not what we were talking about.

  Hang on, I’ll get it here in a second.

  I hate it when this happens.

  Okay, I’ve got it now. Cornbread. Drover and I raced for the cornbread and I won, little suspecting that it would come very near to choking me to death. I coughed and harked and wheezed, and finally managed to . . .

  Eddy the Rac. Forget the stupid cornbread, also the fleas and flies. I don’t know how you got me talking about those things anyway. Somehow you managed to distract me and I wish you wouldn’t do that.

  It makes me look silly, and nothing could be further from the truth. I’m not silly at all. I’m a very serious dog. That’s why you rarely see me smiling, because I rarely smile, because life is very serious.

  And if life is very serious, what’s left to smile about? Not much. You think about that whilst I try to get organized.

  Coming up: Eddy the Rac. Never mind the corn­bread.

  Chapter Two: Caution: Toxic Sawdust Cornbread

  Okay, here we go.

  It was a warm, lazy evening in August. Drover and I were down at the gas tanks, lounging on our gunnysack beds and more or less killing time.

  Hold on. It was a cold brittle evening in Febru­ary. Now we’re cooking.

  Lounging and killing time aren’t things I do very often. Drover does it all the time because . . . well, he’s a fairly boring personality and more than slightly inclined to be lazy.

  Anyways, for a brief span of time, I found my­self killing time. Or to put it another way, I was catching a few moments of rest before darkness fell and I had to go back out on Night Patrol.

  Drover had his ears folded back and was looking up at the clouds. I know it was foolish of me, but on a sudden impulse, I said, “A penny for your thoughts, Drover.”

  “Oh, it’s fine. How’s yours?”

  “Pretty good. It’s been better but it’s been worse.” There was a moment of silence. “What are we talking about?”

  He gave me his usual blank stare. “Your ap­pendix.”

  “My appendix? Why would you ask about my ap­pendix?”

  “I don’t know. You asked about mine and I thought I’d be nice and ask about yours, and I did and you said yours was pretty good. I’m glad it’s better.”

  “Thanks. Yes, it’s much better.” There was another moment of silence. “When did I ask about your appendix?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sometime.”

  “Be more specific please. Yesterday? Today? Tomorrow?”

  He twisted his mouth around and scowled. “Well, it wasn’t tomorrow. And I don’t think it was yesterday. Maybe it was today.”

  “All right, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s see if we can narrow it down a little more. What time today?”

  “Well, let’s see. I don’t remember.”

  “Drover!”

  “Let me think. Okay, I think I’ve got it now. It was just a little while ago.”

  “You mean this evening, just now?”

  “Yep, I’m almost sure it was.”

  I shook my head. “Drover, what I said was, a penny for your thoughts.”

  “I’ll be derned. I thought you asked about my appendix.”

  “No. I did not ask about your appendix.”

  “I’ll be derned. I guess I heard the penny part and thought it was appendix instead of a penny.”

  “Yes, it certainly appears that’s what you thought, but that’s not what I said.”

  “I guess not.”

  “In the first place, I don’t care about your appendix. In the second place, I’m not sure that dogs even have one. In the third place, you’re wasting my valuable time.”

  “Sorry. I thought I had one.”

  “You don’t have one.”

  “Then how come it hurts all the time?”

  I glared at the runt. “If you don’t have one, it can’t hurt.”

  “No fooling? Gosh, I feel better already.”

  “Good. I’m feeling slightly insane.”

  “Course, this old leg still gives me fits. Maybe it was the leg all the time.”

  “It’s been a leg for years, Drover, the very same leg you’ve always had.”

  “I guess you’re right. Gosh, I feel great, Hank. Thanks a million.”

  Sometimes . . . oh well.

  At that very moment I was rescued from the swamp of Drover’s mind by the slamming of the screen door up at the house. My ears shot up. My eyebrows shot up. My mouth began to water. New meaning surged into my life. I leaped to my feet.

  Drover had heard it too, and he leaped to his feet. “Scraps!”

  “Hey Drover, a penny for your thoughts.”

  “A whole penny? Oh boy! Well, let’s see here . . .”

  ZOOM!

  I went streaking up to the yard gate and, heh heh, was first in line for the alleged scraps. I wagged my tail and gave Sally May my most charming smile.

  Her gaze went past me. “Where’s Drover?”

  Who? Oh, him. How should I know? Goofing off somewhere and he probably wasn’t hungry anyway. I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t mind if I ate his share of the, uh, scraps.

  She scraped the pl
ate, and it’s funny how the sound of that fork scraping over the plate causes my mouth to . . . gurgle, slurp, drip . . . causes my mouth to water.

  It also gives me a powerful urge to dive onto the scraps and wolf them down before . . . well, before they can dry up or get stale, so to speak.

  And I did dive onto the scraps and I did wolf . . .

  COUGH, COUGH! HARK, ULP, ARG!

  Cornbread. Dry cornbread.

  Were you aware that at certain stages in its growth and development, cornbread can be poison­ous and very dangerous? It can be. I learned this through bitter experience, when I came very close to strangulating right there in front of Sally May.

  Do you know what she said? She said, and this is a direct quote, she said, “Well, Mister Greedy McPig, if you’d chew your food, instead of gulping it down, maybe you wouldn’t strangle yourself.”

  It had nothing to do with gulping or being greedy. It was her cornbread recipe. I happen to know that you’re supposed to put some kind of moisture into cornbread—milk, eggs, shortening, stuff like that. I mean, nobody can eat cornbread that’s as dry as . . . something. Horse feed. Sand. Sawdust.

  No wonder she threw it out, it would have choked a horse. It’s just a shame that she didn’t label it for what it was—poisonous and toxic material.

  Suppose I had choked to death right there in front of her. Imagine the terrible guilt she would have felt, and I mean for the rest of her life. Terrible burden.

  One of the sad facts that we dogs must live with is that our human friends will slip us any kind of rubbish and garbage. I mean, they mess up the recipe and come up with something THEY can’t chew and THEY can’t swallow and THEY can’t stand to keep in their mouths, and what do they do with it?

  Give it to the dogs.

  Right. As though we spend the whole day just waiting for the next batch of burned toast, incinerated cookies, moldy ham, and sawdust cornbread.

  And they actually expect us to eat the stuff!

  The strange part of all this is that . . . hmmm, we usually do, which makes you wonder . . .

  That’s about all the time we have to spend on Toxic Sawdust Cornbread.