Wagons West Read online

  Wagons West

  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

  Published in the United States of America by Maverick Books, Inc., 2016

  Copyright © John R. Erickson, 2016

  All rights reserved

  Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-167-4

  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 Kate, Sam, Todd, Madeline and Abigail Bahorich

  Contents

  Chapter One A Herd of Sheep

  Chapter Two Rocket Dog to the Rescue

  Chapter Three The Dreaded Broom

  Chapter Four Twucks in the Yard

  Chapter Five The Burrfessional Eggsplorer

  Chapter Six Masked Bandits Rob the Stage Coach

  Chapter Seven George Eat Old Gray Rat

  Chapter Eight I Have No Use for a Nap

  Chapter Nine Our Vocabulary Lesson for the Day

  Chapter Ten Westward Ho the Wagons!

  Chapter Eleven Prisoners in a Cave

  Chapter Twelve The Ominous Riddle of Fog

  Chapter One: A Herd of Sheep

  It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. The mystery began on a warm day in the spring. That was the day Little Alfred and I set out in a covered wagon to explore the Wild West and I had to solve the Ominous Riddle of Fog. It was also the day that Pete the Barncat tried to eat a friend of mine.

  You probably don’t believe that Kitty tried to do such a thing, but he did. We’ll get to that in a minute, so be patient.

  Spring came hard that year. Which year? Great question. It’s important that we get the timing right on these things, because if you start off on the wrong foot, the footer you go, the wronger it gets.

  We dogs have two right feet, don’t you see (the front and the back), but also two wrong feet (the back and the front), so we have to be careful in making these calculations. Timing is crucial in the Security Business.

  Even so, I don’t remember which year it was. It came after the previous year but right before the next one, and that’s as close as we can get. Sometimes we have to use our best estimate. In the Security Business, timing isn’t everything.

  The important thing is that spring followed winter, but winter didn’t want to leave. We had a few pretty days and then got blasted by another cold front—warm day, cold day; pretty day, ugly day with sleet and cold wind, back and forth.

  A dog gets tired of that pattern after a while and wishes that winter would just go away and leave us alone, and you’ll be surprised to know that we have a Barking Routine that we used to hasten the approach of spring. We called it, “Winter, Take a Hike.”

  We used it quite a lot that year, but I’m sorry to report that…well, it didn’t seem to do much good. It appeared that the weather was doing pretty muchly what it wanted to do, never mind what those of us in the Security Division had to say about it.

  I don’t suppose you’d want to hear our Barking Routine, would you? You would? Well, let’s think about that for a second. See, it’s pretty heavily classified, which means that we don’t allow just anyone to hear it. If the Charlies ever got hold of it, there’s no telling how much damage they might cause.

  On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if we lifted the veil just enough to give you a peek. We’ll try it and see what happens, but you have to promise not to blab it around. Promise?

  Okay, here we go. Check this out.

  Winter Take a Hike

  Barking Routine #034-66-772

  CAUTION!!

  Pretty Heavily Classified Information!

  Winter, take a hike.

  Excuse us, but we’d like

  For you to leave, go fly a kite,

  Walk or run or ride a bike,

  Just go…away!

  We’re sick of wind and chill.

  It’s like a dentist’s drill.

  We’ve had enough, we’ve had our fill

  Of winter’s drab and bitter pill,

  So go…away!

  We hate to make a scene,

  But we must intervene.

  We’re tired of brown and shriveled things,

  So take a hike and bring the green.

  And go…AWAY!

  End of Pretty Heavily Classified Section

  PLEASE DESTROY!

  So there you are. What do you think? Pretty awesome, huh? You bet. A lot of people think that ranch dogs just lie around, taking naps and waiting for scraps, but that’s only a tiny part of what we do. There are levels to this job that the general public just doesn’t know about.

  They’re not supposed to know. We don’t want them to know. We’d much rather conduct our business under the cover of secrecy.

  Anyway…where were we? I don’t remember.

  Does anybody remember what we were discussing?

  Huh. I’m drawing a blank.

  Wait, hold everything. Springtime. Now we’re cooking.

  Okay, as usual, my day started before daylight and I had already barked up the sun by the time Loper and Slim showed up at the machine shed. They climbed into a pickup and drove off to a field east of headquarters. As I recall, they were plowing the ground and planting feed, and seemed to be in a hurry to get it done before a rain.

  The weather report on the radio was calling for a 50% chance of thunderstorms, don’t you see. Normal people see that as a 50% chance of nothing, but ranchers and cowboys get excited about it.

  I gave them an escort all the way to the mailbox, then returned to headquarters and put in a few hours doing Bird Patrol. See, the down-side of springtime is that we get an invasion of tweet-tweets. They come from everywhere and perch in my trees, without permission to perch in my trees, and we’re talking about thousands of little birdie trespassers.

  And you talk about NOISE! They tweet. They twitter. They squeak, squawk, whistle, warble, flitter, flutter, flap, and fly. A dog can hardly take a decent nap…that is, it’s almost impossible for us to conduct Ranch Business with all the noise.

  We have to attend meetings, don’t you know, endless meetings: the Budget Committee, the Long Range Planning Group, the Weather Committee, the Commission on Cats…the list goes on and on. So, yes, after doing Bird Patrol, I was chairing a meeting of the Long Range Planning Group, when a stranger burst into the room and delivered some alarming news.

  “Hank, you’d better wake up. A bird just hit the window.”

  I didn’t recognize the guy. He must have been a new employee. I looked up from the sprawl of spreadsheets that covered the conference table, blinked my eyes, and studied his face. It was located on the front of his head and consisted of one nose, one mouth, and two eyes.

  That checked out, but I still didn’t recognize him. “Calm down. You said a herd bit the window?”

  “No, a bird hit the window.”

 
“A herd of what—cattle, buffalo, deer, sheep? Be specific.”

  “Not a herd. A bird.”

  “Okay, you heard a bird, so what? Listen, pal, I’ve been hearing birds every second of every day for the past two weeks. They’re driving me nuts, so don’t tell me about birds. Furthermore, you’ve interrupted this meeting.”

  “What meeting?”

  “The meeting that was meeting. You’ve interrupted a very important…” I took a closer look at his face. “How long have you been working here?”

  “Oh…forever, I guess.”

  “Then you should know better than to burst into the muddle of a meedle.”

  “I think you were asleep.”

  “You keep talking about sheep. What are they doing on this ranch?”

  “Not sheep. SLEEP.”

  “Of course sheep sleep, but sheep have no business sleeping on this outfit. This is a cattle ranch and…” I rose from my chair, with the intention of pacing around the room. It’s something I do to concentrate the hocus of my pocus, only this time something went awry with my legs. I lurched to the left and collapsed on the floor. “Sorry. My leg must have gone to sleep.”

  “Yeah, along with everything else.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’ve been sleeping all morning.”

  “How dare you…” I hoisted myself up on all-fours and took a moment to gather my thoughts. “All right, let’s get to the bottom of this. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  He heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes around. “I’m Drover.”

  “Wait, hold it right there. I have a runt on my staff named Drover. Does that strike you as odd?”

  “No, ‘cause it’s me. I’m the real Drover. Hi.”

  I looked closer at him and…hmm…paced a few steps away. “Drover, you could have saved us a lot of trouble if you had identified yourself, instead of blabbering nonsense about sheep and goats and buffalo.”

  “You were asleep.”

  “I was NOT asleep, and I’ll thank you to stop spreading lies! Now, for the last time, tell me about the sheep.”

  “There aren’t any sheep. A bird hit the window.”

  “We don’t have any windows.”

  “Up at the house. It keeps flying into the window glass.”

  I gave that some thought. “Oh, I see now. Yes, those birds do this every spring, crash into windows. They’re such fools.”

  “It’s a little owl. I think you know her.”

  “I don’t know any owls. I don’t socialize with owls.”

  “Remember Madame Moonshine?”

  “Never heard of her. Now, if you’ll…did you say Madame Moonshine? A little owl?”

  “Yep, that’s her.”

  I stared at the ground for a long moment. “I know her.”

  “Hee hee. I told you.”

  “Please don’t giggle and gloat when you happen to get something right.”

  Then Drover moved closer and delivered some shocking news. “If she knocks herself out on the glass, Pete’s waiting to eat her.”

  PETE?

  And so the crisis began, with Drover bringing the news that one of our precious little birdie friends was in danger of being devoured by the cat.

  Pretty scary, huh? You bet.

  Chapter Two: Rocket Dog to the Rescue

  Drover’s words caused my head to snap to attention. “What! Pete is going to…stand by, soldier, we’re fixing to Launch All Dogs!”

  Have we discussed my Position on Birds? Maybe not, but maybe we’d better. A lot of your ordinary mutts consider birds a nuisance. Ordinary mutts bark at the birds and try to chase them away.

  Me? I’ve always taken a more enlightened position. Yes, birds cause a certain amount of distraction, but THINK OF ALL THE BEAUTY THEY BESTOW UPON OUR RANCH.

  The flinches and the robinsons and the oreganos add color to a drab world. The song of the markingbird breaks the monotony of long days, and the little swillers are so graceful as they swoop and turn in the air—feathered poetry, you might say. What kind of dreary world would this be without our birds?

  But don’t expect your ordinary run of mutts to notice any of that, and most of all, don’t expect any kind of Art Appreciation from a scheming, selfish little ranch cat. Do you suppose that cats give a rip about feathered poetry or lovely bird songs? They don’t. You know what cats do with our precious little birdie friends?

  EAT THEM.

  That was the crisis facing us. Our local cat was lurking and scheming and waiting for an opportunity to cheap-shot one of the feathered visitors on my ranch, and I was just the dog to bring it to a screeching halt.

  I dived into my Rocket Dog suit, turned the dials to the Blast-Off Position, and went roaring away from the Security Division’s Vast Office Complex. Oh, you should have seen it! I went swooping over trees and buildings, and executed a smooth landing on the gravel drive behind the ranch house. There, I shucked off the RD suit and rushed to the yard gate.

  It took me several moments to reconoodle the situation and gather up the pieces of the peesle. The puzzle, that is, the puds of the piddle. The pieces of the petal. Phooey.

  It took me several moments to peddle the puddle…it took me several moments to peedle together the piddles of the…let’s just skip this.

  It really burns me up when this happens. I mean, a guy gets all excited about describing an important event, but when the words come out of his moth, they’ve turned to mush. Nonsense. Gibberish. It makes him sound…well, not too bright.

  Let’s slow things down and try this one more time. What I saw was a complicated scene. A bird, a little prairie dog owl, was fluttering its wings, hovering in front of a window on the second story of the house, and jabbering some kind of nonsense. Now and then it crashed into the window. Meanwhile…

  The cat was sitting on the sidewalk below—smirking, twitching the end of his tail, and staring up at the activity on the second level. Anyone could see that he was up to no good.

  I turned to my assistant, who had just arrived, huffing and puffing. “I know that bird. It’s Madame Moonshine.”

  “Yeah, I told you.”

  “Stop telling me what you told me.”

  “Yeah, but I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “You were lucky.”

  “What’s she doing up there?”

  That was a good question. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but it looked pretty strange. It appeared that she was screeching at someone. She said, “Imposter! Usurper! Lowly woodpecker, pretender to the Feathered Realm! Away, away, be gone!”

  She delivered that message in a screechy owlish voice, and then…this was really strange…she crashed into the window. For a second, it appeared that the impact would cause her to fall to the ground. In fact, she did lose altitude, but at the last second, she flapped her way out of trouble and swooped back to the window.

  And the cat was waiting and watching down below.

  Drover said, “I just figured it out. She sees her reflection in the glass and thinks it’s another bird.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Gosh, that rhymes.”

  “You’re wasting time.”

  “That rhymes too.”

  “Get to the point, if you have one.”

  “She sees herself in the glass. You did that once. Remember that time with the mirror? You saw yourself in the mirror and thought it was a Phantom Dog. Hee hee. Boy, that was funny.”

  I gave him a scalding glare. “Drover, I don’t know what you hope to gain by spreading lies about your commanding officer, but let me warn you. This conversation could end up in your permanent peppermint.”

  “My what?”

  “Your permanent record.”

  “You don’t remember barking at the mirror?”

  �
��Of course I don’t remember. I don’t remember a lot of things that never happened.”

  “Yeah, but it happened, honest.”

  I rewound the Tape of My Life and turned my mind back to that afternoon in the machine shed, and remembered…well, I was barking at my reflection in a stupid mirror. “Okay, maybe I remember, but there’s a huge difference between what I did and what that bird is doing.”

  “No, it’s the same thing.”

  “It is NOT the same. She’s a bird and I’m a dog. I will always be a dog. I’m proud to be a dog, so stop trying to say that I’m a bird.” He shook his head and crossed his eyes. “And stop crossing your eyes when I talk to you.”

  “Talking to you is hopeless.”

  “Well, hopeless is better than no hope at all. The point is that I am not a bird.”

  “I never said you’re a bird.”

  You see what I have to live with? Endless arguments about nothing. Drover gets a crazy idea in his head and…oh well.

  I paced several steps away and gazed up at the sky. “All right, listen up. I’ve reviewed all the evidence in this case and here’s the situation. That owl sees her reflection in the window glass and thinks it’s another bird. She’s attacking the image in the glass. In small but tiny ways, it reminds me of my encounter with the Phantom in the Mirror.”

  “I’ll be derned. I never would have thought of that.”

  “Yes, well, you have no mental discipline. You just spout whatever nonsense comes into your head.”

  “Sorry. I’ll try harder next time.”

  “Good. Now, let’s put this episode behind us.” I paced back to him and laid a paw on his shoulder. “Are you sorry you said I was a bird?”

  “Oh yes, and I’ll never say it again. What about the cat?”

  “The cat is not a bird either.”

  “Yeah, but he’s fixing to eat one. Look!”

  Huh? I turned my gaze back to the house, just in time to see a tragedy unfoiling before my very eyes. The owl crashed into the window so hard, it knocked her senseless, and she fell like a rock into the flower bed. An instant later, the cat sprang off the porch and landed on top of the bird.