The Curse of the Incredible Priceless Corncob Read online

  The Curse of the Incredible Priceless Corncob

  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 Maverick Books, Inc. 1986,

  Texas Monthly Press, 1988, and Gulf Publishing Company, 1990.

  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., 2011.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © John R. Erickson, 1986

  All rights reserved

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Erickson, John R.

  The curse of the incredible priceless corncob / John R. Erickson ; illustrations by Gerald L. Holmes.

  p. cm.

  Originally published in series: Hank the Cowdog ; 7.

  Summary: While trying to outwit his arch enemy Pete the Barncat, Hank the Cowdog is duped into believing a worthless corncob will bring him fame and fortune.

  ISBN 978-1-59188-107-0 (pbk.)

  [1. Dogs—Fiction. 2. West (U.S.)—Fiction. 3. Humorous stories. 4. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Holmes, Gerald L., ill. II. Title. III. Series: Erickson, John R. Hank the Cowdog ; 7.

  PZ7.E72556Cu 1999 [Fic]—dc21 98-41816 CIP AC

  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

  Jonye Curry Patterson

  Contents

  Chapter One An Astronomy Lesson for the Dunce

  Chapter Two The Mystery of the Corncobs

  Chapter Three Another Humiliating Defeat for the Cat

  Chapter Four The Seed of Greed Takes Root in Drover’s Tiny Brain

  Chapter Five The Plot Gets Thicker, So to Speak

  Chapter Six Chosen for a Very Dangerous Assignment

  Chapter Seven A Narrow Escape from Horned Death

  Chapter Eight No Barrel of Fun

  Chapter Nine I’m Rich!

  Chapter Ten Early Retirement

  Chapter Eleven Captured by Cannibals

  Chapter Twelve A Wild but Short Romance. Also an Exciting Conclusion

  Epiglottis

  Chapter One: An Astronomy Lesson for the Dunce

  It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. I’m still not sure how the corncobs fit into the overall case, or for that matter what part Pete the Barncat played in the mystery, but on the morning of September 7, at approximately ten o’clock, the cowboys roared into headquarters and called me up for Special Emergency Duty.

  Little did I know what danger lay in store for me or that my very life would be hanging in the balance before the day was done. But then, that’s getting the cart before the wagon.

  Let’s back up and take first things first. In the security business, you can get yourself in a mess trying to take first things second or second things first. First things should always be taken first.

  Okay. Let’s start with the corncobs.

  On the evening of the morning before the day of which I speak . . . Let’s try that again. On the evening before the morning of the day of which . . .

  Might be simpler just to say, “On the evening of September 6.” Okay, on the evening of September 6, Drover and I were down in the vicinity of the gas tanks, taking it easy and catching a few winks of sleep before we had to go out on night patrol.

  As I recall the scene, I was reclined on my gunnysack bed, hovering in the twilight zone between watchfulness and more or less complete oblivion. In other words, although my more critical faculties were pretty muchly in neutral, I continued to monitor all sounds and earatory data in the Ready Room of my mind.

  This is a trick of the trade, so to speak, that a guy builds up over a period of years. When you’re on call twenty-four hours a day, when the safety of the ranch and all its inhabitants depends on your ability to scramble at the first sign of danger, you learn to grab your sleep when it comes and to remain alert even while sleeping.

  Hencely, even though an outside observer would have pronounced me asleep, the inner recesses of my mind continued to monitor incoming signals. A high percentage of those signals were coming from Drover, my associate, who sat nearby, staring up at the sky and composing dumb questions.

  “Hank?”

  My eyelids twitched but I tried to ignore him.

  “Hank?”

  “Um.”

  “You awake, Hank?”

  I cracked my left eye and snapped a visual update for my data base, but this procedure met with only partial success since my left eye was still rolling around in its sprocket. Again, I tried to ignore him.

  “Hank?”

  “What!”

  “You awake?”

  “Of course it will! If it weren’t for that, what else could it be?”

  “What?”

  “You heard what I said. Don’t sit there pretending . . . what did I say?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, if you’re not sure, Drover, who is?”

  “You got me.”

  “Then I’ve got very little. The question is, what is the meaning of this conversation?”

  “I’m not sure, Hank. I just asked if you were awake.”

  “And what did I say?”

  “That was the part I didn’t understand.”

  That did it. I had no choice but to cancel the Sleep Mode and go back on duty. I opened both eyes and sat up.

  “Drover, do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”

  “Not really. I was just trying to make conversation. I get bored sometimes.”

  “If I had to live with that tiny brain of yours, I’d get bored too.”

  “Yeah, but even though it’s small, it’s not very big.”

  “Don’t try to argue with me. The point is that . . . what was the point?”

  “I think we were trying to decide . . . I’m not sure there was a point.”

  “Hence, by simple logic, we see that you’ve lured me into another pointless conversation. And you also woke me up, and don’t try to deny it.”

  “Okay. Hank, you see the moon?”

  I squinted my eyes and looked toward the east and saw the alleged moon. “Of course I see the moon. Anyone with eyes can see the moon. I saw the moon at this same time last night and last month and last year. I assume, since that’s such a stupid question, you’ll follow it with another stupid question.”

  He shook his head. “No, that was all. I just wondered if you saw the moon.”

  I pushed myself up on all-fours and lumbered over to him. I was not in, shall we say, a jolly frame of mind. “Listen, pipsqueak, after interrupting my sleep, you’d better have another question in min
d.”

  “Oh. Well, all right. Let me see here. Hank, how come the moon comes up in the evening and goes down after midnight?”

  I stared at him and shook my head. “See? I knew you had one more stupid question in there. All right, I’ll tell you, but I expect you to pay attention and remember your lessons. I don’t want to go through this every night for the rest of our lives.”

  “Okay, Hank, I’m ready.”

  “Number one: hot air rises. Number two: cold air unrises, or you might prefer to say that it falls.”

  “Yeah, I like that better.”

  “Number three: the air at the end of the day is hot. Number four: the air at the end of the night is cold. Can you figger it from there or do I have to fill in the blanks?”

  He squinted one eye and thought about it. “Well, that tells me a lot about air but I was kind of curious about the moon.”

  “They’re one and the same, you dunce.”

  “You mean the moon’s nothing but air? I thought it was made out of cheese.”

  “It IS made out of cheese, but do you think it’s up there hanging in water?”

  “Well . . . no.”

  “Then what’s it hanging in?”

  Again, he squinted at the moon. “Right now, I’d say it’s hanging in that big cottonwood tree down by the creek.”

  “Absolutely wrong. It appears to be, but that’s only a tropical illusion.”

  “It is? Then that means . . .”

  “Exactly. It’s actually hanging in thin air.”

  “It does look pretty thin.”

  “It’s very thin, Drover, and since thin air is thinner than thick air and warm air is warmer than cool air, it follows from simple deduction that the moon rises. I can’t make it any simpler than that.”

  “Oh, that’s simple enough . . . I guess.”

  “Any more questions about the moon, the sun, the planets, the canopy of stars that covers the skies at night? This is the time to ask your questions, Drover, while we’re between investigations.”

  “Well . . . what would happen if the moon was hanging in thin water instead of thin air? Would it sink or float?”

  “That would depend on how thin the water was, and I think that’s about all the time we have for questions. We’ve got work to do.”

  “I thought this was the time to ask questions.”

  “It was, but time marches on, and we either join the parade or go to the rodeo.”

  Drover scratched his ear. “I’ve never been to a rodeo.”

  “Yes, but you’ve never been to a parade either, so that only proves what I’ve said all along.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s time to get to work. There’s more to this life than rodeos and parades.”

  “I sure hope so. I’ve never been to either one.”

  I stared at the runt. “I just said that. Why are you repeating what I’ve already said?”

  He hung his head. “I don’t know. It just sounded good at the time, and I didn’t know what else to say.”

  “Drover, when you don’t have anything important to say, it’s usually better just to keep your trap shut.”

  “Okay Hank, but it’s liable to get awful quiet around here.”

  “That gives us something to hope for, doesn’t it, and hope is the fuel for the machinery of life, so that pretty well wraps things up. Are you ready to go on patrol?”

  “Well . . . I was feeling kind of sleepy, to tell you the truth.”

  “I appreciate the truth but the sleep will have to wait. We’ve got a job to do.”

  “Oh rats.”

  At that very moment, I heard the back door slam up at the house. I perked my ears and listened. Sally May’s footsteps on the sidewalk, seventeen of them (seventeen footsteps, not seventeen sidewalks). Then, a fork scraping on a plate. Then . . .

  “Kitty kitty kitty! Here Hank, here Drover!”

  Ah ha! It was scrap time at the yard gate, one of my very favorite times of the day. “Come on, Drover. Our most important job right now is to beat the cat to the scraps. Let’s move out.”

  We left the gas tanks and went sprinting up the hill.

  Little did we know what awaited us at the top of the hill, and for the very best of reasons.

  We weren’t there yet.

  Chapter Two: The Mystery of the Corncobs

  Just as I had surmised, Sally May was standing at the yard gate with a plate in her hand. And just as I had NOT surmised, Pete had beat us there.

  In other words, we had failed in our primary mission of the evening, to beat the cat to the scraps. Failure is painful enough by itself, but when it comes at the hands of a cat, it becomes almost un­bearable, even though a cat has paws instead of hands.

  Drover and I couldn’t have responded to the call any faster, which left only one solution to the puzzle: Pete had been tipped off about the scraps. He had gotten inside information. In other words, he had cheated, which is the typical cat method of doing business.

  They don’t play by the rules, see. They cheat and use sneaky behavior to compensate for certain design mistakes that were made when cats were first invented. When you deal with cats on a daily basis, as I do, you have to be prepared to play dirty.

  Well, by the time we got there, Sally May had already scraped off one portion of scraps, and I don’t need to tell you who was there to snatch them the instant they hit the ground: Mister Cheater, Mister Greediness, Pete the Barncat.

  I went straight to him, figgered I’d check out his scraps to see exactly what he’d got. “Out of the way, cat. We’re taking over this deal and you can run along and play.”

  Pete cut his eyes in my direction, pinned his ears down, and started growling and chewing at the same time. You ever notice how a cat does that? They come out with this peculiar sound, see, something between a yowl and a growl, but they’re so greedy and stingy with food, they don’t even bother to stop chewing.

  That’s what Pete did, and hey, there’s just something about that kind of action that makes my temper jump about twenty degrees. Before I knew it, I was growling back at him.

  And Drover, who was safely behind me and out of the range of Pete’s claws, began jumping up and down. “Git ’im, Hankie, git ’im!”

  I might very well have got him, I mean just by George cleaned house right there while it was fresh on my mind, but Sally May reached across the fence and whacked me on the head with her spoon, sort of surprised me since I’d forgot she was there.

  “You dogs get back and leave Pete alone! I’m going to feed you over here so you won’t fight.”

  Pete rolled his eyes in my direction and gave me a grin. I backed off, but not until I had sniffed out his scraps: two steak bones and several nice long strips of steak fat, which happens to be a favorite of mine.

  I love steak fat.

  Sally May moved down the fence a ways and scraped our portion off the plate. When it hit the ground, I made a dive for it, scooped up a nice big bone, and began putting the old mandibles to work, so to speak.

  That first taste of steak juice and steak fat sent waves of sheer joy rushing through my mouth, across my tongue, into my salvanilla glands, and on out to the end of my tail. I rolled the morsel around in my mouth for a moment and then sank my teeth into it and . . .

  HUH?

  Suddenly my mouth fell open and went blank, and the so-called steak scrap dropped out like a dead bird falling out of a tree. It hit the ground with a plop. I stared at it, sniffed it, checked it out.

  I looked up at Sally May and wagged my tail. There had been some mistake. She had given me a baked potato hull. I gave her my most sincere, most hurtful look and wagged my tail extra hard.

  I mean, I’m a very forgiving dog. I understand about mistakes. It would be no exaggeration to say that I’ve made several of them myse
lf, in the course of a long and glorious career in security work.

  Sure, I understood, and to help Sally May make a fair division of the scraps, I was willing to take a little extra time out of my busy schedule, walk down the fence, and redistribute some of the steak fat that Pete was growling and yowling over.

  And I had every intention of sharing my baked potato hull with him too.

  I started down the fence.

  “HANK! You leave Pete alone. I won’t have you beating up on the cat.”

  What ever gave her the idea that I was going to . . . “Now, you dogs have plenty to eat, and I’m going to stand right here until you eat it all up.”

  I went back to the spot. Okay, if a baked potato hull was the best I could get . . . It was gone. My baked potato hull was gone! Someone or something had . . .

  I looked at Drover. He swallowed something rather large and grinned.

  “You just ate my baked potato hull, you idiot! I turn my back on you for just a minute and bingo! You’re stealing my food. What next, Drover? Where do you go from being a common food thief?”

  “Well . . . I thought you didn’t want it.”

  “Of course I didn’t want it, but it was still mine.”

  “I’m sorry, Hank, but I was hungry and . . . gosh, I feel so bad, I’ll let you have all the rest of it.”

  “Well . . .” I thought it over. “At least you’ve got enough decency to make a gesture, and even though a gesture is only a gesture, it’s no small potatoes either.”

  “No, I got the potatoes. You can have all the rest.”

  “That’s exactly what I intend to do, Drover.”

  I moved into eating position above the scraps. Drover sat down a few feet away and watched me with a cock-eyed smile, while Sally May towered above me and watched with her arms crossed.

  I took a large something into my mouth and began chewing. It was soft on the outside, hard on the inside, and tasted a bit like . . . well, corn. As a matter of fact, it tasted a lot like corn, and the more I chewed it, the cornier it tasted.