The Disappearance of Drover Read online

  The Disappearance of Drover

  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., 2011

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  Copyright © John R. Erickson, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-157-5

  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

  For my grandchildren: Kale and Alyssa Erickson, and Cameron and ReAnna Wilson

  Contents

  Chapter One This Is the First Chapter

  Chapter Two A Trespassing Badger

  Chapter Three The Pit of Death

  Chapter Four The Rubber Baby-Buggy Bumpers

  Chapter Five My Parade

  Chapter Six Drover Disappears

  Chapter Seven Life Without Drover

  Chapter Eight A Cowboy Cook

  Chapter Nine Back on the Case

  Chapter Ten We Get Ambushed

  Chapter Eleven Caution: Really Scary Stuff

  Chapter Twelve Drover Is Lost Forever

  Chapter One: This Is the First Chapter

  It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Slim was really steamed when he got to town and figured out that he had two dogs in the back of his pickup, but it wasn’t our fault. We had perfectly good reasons for being there, but it might take a while to explain it.

  Do we have time to go through all the details that led up to our spending the night in the back of his pickup? Before you answer, let me warn you that it might get pretty scary. And sad. I mean, when Drover vanished without a trace . . .

  What do you think? Should we go on with this story or put it in the vault where we keep stories that are too scary or too sad for human consumption? You probably didn’t know that we have such a vault, and there’s a reason why you don’t. Everything that goes into the vault has either been classified Top Secret, Top Sad, or Top Scary, and I’m one of the few dogs on earth that even know it exists.

  I’m in on the secret because . . . well, I’m Head of Ranch Security.

  It’s a huge vault, made of solid steel, and it occupies a whole wall on the twelfth floor of the Security Division’s Vast Office Complex. There’s only one way in and one way out, and guess whose gunnysack bed is parked right in front of the vault.

  Mine. Nobody goes in or comes out without dealing with me. That’s how serious we are about the stuff that’s locked inside the vault, and that’s why I can’t tell you about it. As far as you’re concerned, it doesn’t exist.

  Sorry I brought it up. Or, to come at it from another angle, I didn’t bring it up. Maybe you thought I did, but I was misquoted. It happens all the time. There is no vault in our Vast Office Complex, and if there were, I couldn’t tell you about it. If I did . . . well, we might all be fried for treason.

  Tried for freezing.

  Tried for treason, there we go. We might all get fried for freezing, and we don’t need any of that.

  Hmmm. We seem to have gotten off the subject, and I’m not sure where we started. Somehow you coaxed me into talking about the secret vault and . . . wait, here we go.

  The story. It’s going to get pretty scary and sad, that’s the point, so you have to decide whether we should mush on with it or find something else to do. What do you think? Keep going? Are you sure about that?

  Well, I guess you’re old enough to be making decisions, but if things get out of hand, don’t blame me.

  Okay, let’s set the stage. It was April, as I recall. We’d made it through the worst of the winter and had begun to notice the first signs of spring: buds on the elm trees, flights of cranes honking overhead as they made their way back to the north country, and a number of stopover birds that visit my ranch every fall and spring. They’re not invited, but they stop anyway. They occupy my trees, mooch birdseed out of Sally May’s feeder, and twitter all day long.

  As you might know, I’m not fond of birds, but there’s not much I can do about them. If a dog spent all his time barking at birds, he’d have no energy left for the more important jobs, such as barking at the mailman and humbling the cats. Hencely, for a couple of weeks every fall and spring, I have to put up with all their tweeting and twittering.

  Drover and I had spent the day at Ranch Headquarters, supervising a project that involved Slim and Loper. They had discovered a spring of water down at the corrals. I mean, all of a sudden and overnight, it had just popped out of the ground and had formed a nice little pool.

  In a dry country like ours, you’d think that might be cause for celebration, but it wasn’t. Just the opposite, and here’s why. Around here, natural springs don’t just pop out of the ground, and the cowboys suspected that our bubbling spring had something to do with a leaky water pipe that was buried about three feet underground.

  Fellers, you talk about something that will poison the atmosphere on a ranch! An underground water leak will do it, because it involves the use of shovels and manual labor. As you might know, cowboys are allergic to shovels. Bring one out in front of a cowpuncher, and he’ll break out in hives.

  And mad? They were uncommonly mad. See, the ground in our corrals wasn’t what you would call easy digging. Over the years, it had been packed by the hooves of thousands of cattle and horses. If you were going to choose a spot on the ranch where you never wanted to dig a hole, it would be in the middle of the wire lot—exactly where the “spring” had popped out of the ground.

  And that’s the job I was supervising. You never heard such whining and complaining. It started the moment the first shovel touched the ground and went on most of the afternoon. You want to listen in on some of their conversation? I don’t suppose it would hurt anything. Stand by to roll tape.

  Transcript of Water Line Episode #205

  Top Secret

  Slim: You know, a guy spends the first half of his life investing in leather and horseflesh and dreaming of the day he can take a real cowboy job, and he spends the second half of his life digging holes in the ground.

  Loper: I guess you should have gone to college.

  Slim: No, I should have taken a job on a cow outfit where a man can use his horse and rope instead of a frazzling shovel.

  Loper: Well, I’d say you’re lucky to have a job of any kind. As slow as you dig, we might still be here next Christmas.

  Slim: As hard as this ground is, I might not live that long.

  Loper: Good. I won’t have to send you a Christmas card. It’ll save me the cost of a stamp.

  Slim: Who laid this stinking waterline anyway?

  Loper: My granddaddy.

  Slim: Well, I’m going to plant sandburs on his gr
ave for using cheap pipe and covering it up with pavement.

  Loper: It was during the Depression, when nobody had two nickels to rub together. They used whatever kind of pipe they could scrounge up. After fifty years, it starts to leak.

  Slim: Well, me and your granddaddy have one thing in common: depression. I ain’t been so depressed since we had to bail out the septic tank.

  Loper: Quit feeling sorry for yourself and dig.

  Slim: I am digging, and if I die from heat stroke and overwork, you can push me in this hole and cover me up.

  Loper: That would sure cut down on the noise.

  Slim: And on my tombstone, you can say, “He always wanted to die ahorseback, but he perished from blisters with a shovel in his hands.”

  Loper: Slim, just dig the hole.

  End of Secret Transcription

  Please Destroy at Once

  And so forth. They went on like that for hours. In between all the snarling and snapping, they even managed to dig enough of a hole to uncover the rusted waterline that had caused the problem. You probably think they replaced the line with a section of brand-new galvanized pipe. Ha. They fixed it The Cowboy Way, with tar, a strip of inner tube, and a couple of hose clamps.

  If they’d asked my opinion, I would have told ’em to fix it right, but they never want to hear any advice from their dogs. Mark my words, next year at this time, they’ll find a little spring of water bubbling up in the corrals and we’ll have to go through this all over again.

  Oh well. I try to run this ranch in a professional manner, but you can only do so much with a couple of knuckleheaded cowboys.

  At quitting time, Slim fed the horses and headed for his pickup. Drover and I didn’t have any urgent business at Ranch Headquarters, so we decided to hitch a ride and spend the night down at his place.

  See, he’s a bachelor cowboy and has a very intelligent attitude about dogs. He lets us sleep inside the house. Sometimes he sings to us and shares his supper. Sometimes we have mouse hunts before bedtime, and that’s always a lot of fun. The point is that hanging out with Slim is more exciting than occupying a smelly gunnysack bed beneath the gas tanks.

  We reached his shack on Wolf Creek around sundown and followed him up to the porch. When he reached for the door handle, Drover and I were poised to dart inside. It’s a little game we play, don’t you see. The challenge is to see which of us can squirt through the half-opened door and win the I-Got-Here-First Award.

  I guess it’s kind of silly, but what else does a dog have to do when he lives twenty-five miles out in the country?

  So there we were on the porch, poised and quivering with excitement, waiting for Slim to open the door just wide enough so that we could slither inside. But he didn’t open the door.

  Instead, he looked down at us and gave us a scowl. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Well . . . inside the house, of course.

  “Uh-uh. It’s a nice warm spring evening, and y’all can stay on the porch.”

  What! Stay on the . . . Drover and I exchanged looks of shock and disappointment.

  Slim bent down and looked me in the eye. “You spent half the day wallering around in that mud hole, pooch. You stink and you ain’t going to mess up my nice clean house.”

  And with that, he went inside, leaving his loyal dogs to sort through the rubble of a shattered dream.

  Okay, maybe I’d spent a few minutes in the mud hole . . . a few hours . . . all right, I’d spent most of the afternoon lounging in the water, but when people do that, they call it a bath. How’s a dog supposed to cleanse his body and wash his hair? When we bathe in the overflow of the septic tank, they complain about that too, so what’s a dog supposed to do?

  We try so hard to please these people, but sometimes it seems . . . oh well. There’s no future in brooding over injustice in the world. It appeared that we would have to spend the night on the porch.

  But just as Slim entered the house and closed the screen door behind him, I heard a mysterious ringing sound.

  Chapter Two: A Trespassing Badger

  Drover heard it, too. “Gosh, what’s that?”

  “I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound natural to me.”

  “Me neither. You reckon we ought to bark?”

  “Absolutely, yes. Load up Number Three Barks of Alarm and stand by to fire. Ready? Okay, commence barking!”

  Boy, you should have heard us. We spread all four legs, took a firm grip on the porch floor, and rattled the windows with an amazing barrage of . . .

  “Hank, knock it off! I’m on the phone.”

  Huh? Okay, maybe that ringing sound had come from the telephone and, well, we didn’t need to waste good barking on that, but a dog can never be sure about those ringing sounds until he checks them out. In the Security Business, we bark first and ask questions later.

  I cancelled the alert and moved toward the screen door so that I could hear Slim’s side of the conversation. Here’s what I heard.

  “Lloyd? Well, I’m fine except that we need a rain and I spent most of the day doing plumber work. What? Why yes, I bet I could, and I’d enjoy it, too. Let me check with the boss to be sure. If I don’t call you back, I’ll be there at ten with a horse. Bye.”

  He hung up the phone and dialed a number. “Loper? It’s me. They’re shorthanded at the sale barn and need me to help pen cattle tomorrow. I told Lloyd I’d help him, even though I’d rather stay here and dig sewer lines with you.” He laughed, said good-bye, and hung up the phone.

  I was sitting in front of the screen door when he came breezing out. The door caught me by surprise and whacked me on the nose. “Out of the way, dogs; I get to play cowboy tomorrow.” He stopped and looked down at us. “And y’all can’t go. Sorry.”

  And off he went to feed his horse and hook up the stock trailer.

  Well, for his information, I had a long list of jobs to do on the ranch and didn’t have time to go chasing off with him to “play cowboy.” These people seem to think their dogs just sit around . . . hey, I had work to do and a ranch to run, and it sure wasn’t going to break my heart if I missed out on his little adventure.

  If the dogs don’t stay home and keep things running, who will?

  So that was the end of it. Slim did his chores, returned to the house, fixed himself a canned mackerel sandwich for supper (we didn’t get any of it, not even a bite), and went to bed, leaving the elite troops of the Security Division to sleep on the porch.

  It must have been three or four o’clock in the morning when I was awakened by a sound. I lifted my head and focused both ears on a spot of darkness where the sound had . . . there it was again, a scratching sound.

  Behind me, I heard Drover’s voice. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re fixing to find out. Form a line. We’re moving out.”

  “It sure is dark.”

  “Let’s go.”

  We crept off the porch and moved out on silent paws, down the sidewalk, through the yard gate, and into the Great Beyond. We had a sliver of moon, and it gave enough light so that I could see something up ahead. Fifty yards east of the house, I called a halt.

  As usual, Drover wasn’t paying attention and ran into me. “Oops, sorry.”

  “Drover, did you see what I saw?”

  “I didn’t know we had a seesaw.”

  “We don’t have a seesaw. I said, did you see what I saw?”

  He blinked his eyes and glanced around. “Well, let me think. I saw your tail, but then it stopped and I ran into it.”

  “My tail stopped because I stopped. My tail is connected to me, and if you’d pay attention to your business, maybe you’d stop running into me.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I guess I was thinking about goats.”

  I looked into the vacuum of his eyes. “Why were you thinking about goats?”

>   “Oh, I don’t know. Elephants are too big and giraffes are too tall, and goats are about the right size to think about.”

  “Drover, we’re on patrol. Stop blabbering and pay attention. Look over there.”

  He squinted in the direction I was pointing. “I’ll be derned. It’s a goat.”

  I stuck my nose in his face. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but that is not a goat. Look again.”

  “Well . . . it’s not a giraffe.” He let out a gasp. “Oh my gosh, it’s a badger! Last one back to the porch is a rotten egg!”

  I caught him just as he was about to run. “Hold your position! If you’ll notice, he’s only half-grown.”

  “Yeah, but I know about badgers. They’re double-tough.”

  “Drover, I’ll go through this one time, so pay attention. Point One: If you add double-tough and half-grown together, what do you get?”

  “Scared?”

  “No. You get zero. They cancel each other out. The guy’s a shrimp, a zero. Second, there are two of us, which means that we have exactly twice as much firepower as he has.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “Third, he’s digging holes in the pasture.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “What?”

  “I said, what a naughty badger.”

  “Exactly. What we have here is a shrimpy little badger that’s digging holes without a permit, which leads us straight into Point Four: we’re fixing to put a stop to this vandalism of ranch property.” I laid a paw on his shoulder. “And we need a volunteer.”

  There was a moment of silence. “You know, I’ve always dreamed of beating up a badger.”

  “I like your spirit, son.”

  “But this old leg’s really been giving me fits.” He limped around in a circle. “See? Terrible pain.”

  “Drover, it would look very good on your resume if you beat up a badger. Nobody needs to know that he was a shrimp.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” He stumbled and fell to the ground. “Drat the luck, there went the leg! Maybe you’d better take this one.”