The Case of the One-Eyed Killer Stud Horse Read online

  Pretty tough.

  Thirdly, with the same curl in the end of the same tongue we have been discussing, I began easing a bacon end over toward the edge of the plate, even though the root of my tongue was getting tired from the strain of being fully extended. (Try it and see if the root of your tongue doesn’t get tired.)

  Fourthly, just as I was about to throw a coil of tongue around the juicy end of bacon fat, reel it back into my mouth, and gobble it down, Sally May saw what I was doing and smacked me on the nose with the wooden spoon.

  “Get down, Hank! I’ll feed you when Pete gets here.”

  In other words, she had misinterpreted my intentions. Maybe she thought I was merely trying to steal the bacon before her stupid and greedy cat arrived to hog it all. Not a bad idea, actually, but of course I had higher motives.

  On this outfit, it seems to be all right for a cat to be a hog, but let a dog try to be a hog just once and WHACK! He gets it across the nose with a wooden spoon.

  It ain’t fair, but let’s don’t get started on that.

  I turned to Drover. “What are you grinning about?”

  “Who me?”

  “I saw that silly grin on your face. I’d advise you to wipe it off before . . .”

  That whack on the nose had a strange effect on me, made me sneeze. I’m not talking about one little sneeze or even two, I’m talking about a bunch of BIG ones, all in a row, one after another, bang-bang-bang—or sneeze-sneeze-sneeze, you might say. And each one of them sneezes just about blew the end of my nose off.

  This is a fairly rare medical condition known as “Sneezaroma.” Those who get it never forget it, because you can’t stop sneezing.

  Drover still had that silly grin on his face. “Bless you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. You got hay fever?”

  “No, I don’t have ACHOOOO! Hay fever.”

  “Bless you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Sure sounds like hay fever to me.”

  “Sounds can be deceiving, son. Just because I sneeze, that doesn’t mean I have ACHOOOO!”

  “Bless you. I have hay fever too, so I know how it feels.”

  “I just told you, Numbskull, I don’t have hay fever. Sally May hit me on the nose with a spoon and it gave me Sneezaroma. Let’s ACHOO drop it.”

  “Bless you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Maybe you’re allergic to spoons. ACHOO! Gosh, maybe I’m allergic to your sneezes.”

  “Bless you.”

  “Thanks, Hank.”

  “You’re welcome. No, I don’t think so, Drover. More than likely it’s just ACHOO!”

  “Bless you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. ACHOO!”

  “Bless you.”

  “Thanks, Hank.”

  “You’re ACHOO!”

  “Bless ACHOO!”

  “Thank you, and bless you ACHOO!”

  “ACHOOO!”

  “ACHOOO!”

  We were getting nowhere fast. Carrying on an intelligent conversation with Drover is hard enough under the best of conditions, but when we’re both sneezing, it’s very near impossible.

  I was all set to head back down to the gas tanks and put my poor nose to bed, when all at once I saw something that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Prancing down the hill from the machine shed was one of my least favorite characters on the ranch—my arch-enemy, to be exact.

  Pete the Barncat.

  He had his stupid tail stuck straight up in the air and he was purring like a little motorboat. No doubt he was coming to hog all the breakfast scraps, but it was my job to see that he failed in his mission of greed.

  “Hold up, Drover. Unless I’m badly mistaken, we’re fixing to get ourselves into some combat. We’ve got a cat coming in at two o’clock.”

  “Well, better late than tardy.”

  “Exactly. Battle stations, Drover, and prepare for some heavy duty barking!”

  “AAAA-CHOOOO!”

  “That’s not barking.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Thanks, Hank.”

  And with that, we turned our menacing glares on Pete the Barncat.

  Chapter Three: The Case of the Embezzled Scrambled Eggs

  I’ve never understood exactly what it is about Pete that gets me so stirred up. Under ordinary circumstances, I keep an iron grip on my emotions, which comes in handy in the security business because emotions have no place in that spear.

  Sphere, I probably should say. I don’t like Pete, that’s the point. He’s your typical arrogant, sniveling, scheming, insolent cat. I don’t like the way he holds his tail, the way he walks, or the way he rubs up against everything in sight.

  I don’t like his face. I don’t like his whiney voice. I don’t like his attitude. I don’t like cats, but I wouldn’t like Pete even if he wasn’t a cat.

  When he appeared on the scene, my ears jumped up and a growl began to rumble deep in my throat. It was just by George automatic.

  By this time, Loper had left in his pickup, but Sally May was still there with her plate of goodies, which I had every intention of protecting from Pete. Sally May must have heard me growling.

  “Hank, stop that! I won’t have you bullying the cat.”

  I twisted my head around and looked up at her with my most sincere expression of sincerity. Bullying the cat! I hadn’t even touched the little snot, much less given him the pounding he so richly deserved.

  I whimpered and whapped my tail on the ground.

  She bent down and brought her face only inches away from the end of my nose. “I know what you’re thinking, Hank, but if you start tormenting the cat again, I’m going to whack you over the head with this spoon.”

  Suddenly I was seized by an impulse to lick her on the nose. I don’t know why. It just seemed the appropriate thing to do. My tongue shot out and gave her a big, loving, juicy, peace-making, forgiving, friendly cowdog lick on the nose.

  And it was such a big extra special lick that some of it lapped over and got her on the mouth.

  My goodness. You’d have thought that she’d been bitten by a water moccasin, the way she drew back and stiffened up.

  “Don’t do that! I don’t like dogs who lick all the time! No, no, no. Don’t lick.”

  And here’s the real shocker. She not only wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, but she spit. Or is it “spitted”? “Spat”? She spatted, not at anyone in particular but in a way that made you think she’d just gotten a taste of poison.

  Really shocked me. I mean, all those years I’d thought she was a proper lady, and then to see her spitting . . . well, it kind of disappointed me, I guess you’d say. I’d expected more from Sally May than spitting.

  I turned to Drover and shrugged. “How do you please these people? They don’t want you to growl, they don’t want you to bark, they don’t want you to hamburgerize the cats. After years and years of working up the courage to show a little affection, you give ’em a lick on the face and, whammo, they throw it right back at you.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t like dogs.”

  “And once you’ve been rebuked and rejected and scorned, you withdraw into the inner recessitudes of your dark self, and something happens to you, Drover. A guy begins to change in little ways. It makes him hard and cold and hard.”

  “You said ‘hard’ twice.”

  “It makes him think about running away and becoming an outlaw, a killer dog who howls in the night and spends his life looking for revenge.”

  “I spent all day looking for a bone once.”

  “Exactly. Yes, rejection is a terrible thing, Drover.”

  “I guess so
. Maybe you’d better not lick her in the face any more.”

  I stared at the runt. “Is that all you can say? Is that all the comfort you can give me in this time of sorrow?”

  “Well . . . you might try it and see if it helps.”

  “A simple answer from a simple mind. I should have known better than to expose the burning embers of my heart to the likes of you.”

  “Heartburn’s pretty bad, but it beats hay fever.”

  At that moment, I realized that Pete was rubbing against my right front leg and flicking the end of his tail across my chin. Suddenly, I forgot my sorrows and began thinking nasty thoughts.

  “Hi, Hankie. Sure is a pretty day, isn’t it?”

  My lips curled, my eyes flared, and a growl rumbled in my throat. I glanced up at Sally May. Had she been looking the other way, Pete wouldn’t have thought the day was so pretty. But she wasn’t looking the other way. She was looking at me.

  “Don’t you dare! Now, you dogs had better learn to get along with the cat. Here, kitty kitty.”

  Pete gave me one last grin, stepped on my tail, and shot through a hole in the fence. Then, before my very eyes, Sally May scraped MY juicy, fatty bacon ends out on the ground and gave them all to the cat.

  Well, hey, that was too much. I barked. I howled. I cried and moaned and protested this injustice. Sally May came over to the fence and gave me a scowl.

  “Oh be quiet, Hank. I’ve got some for you too. Here.” She scraped something off the plate. It hit the ground.

  I sniffed it. Scrambled eggs and burned toast. I gave her a mournful look and whapped my tail. I mean, scrambled eggs are okay, but I had sort of prepared my taste buds for something in the bacon department.

  I put some serious begs on her. No sale. All right, if scrambled eggs was the best we could do . . . I looked down and was stunned to see that the eggs had vanished. I turned to Drover, who was licking his chops.

  “Did you eat my eggs?”

  “Who me?”

  “Of course you did. Yes, it’s all coming clear now. First the cat steals my bacon, then my own trusted assistant embezzles my eggs. Oh vile world! Oh wickedness! Oh treachery! How much deeper canst thou sink?”

  “Are you asking me or the world?”

  “I’m asking you, Mr. Egg Embezzler.”

  “Oh. What was the question again?”

  Funny, I couldn’t remember the question either. Oh well. “The point is, you should be ashamed of yourself. For that, Drover, you can spend the next hour standing in the corner.”

  “Oh drat.”

  “Don’t argue with me. Go to your room, put your nose in the corner, and say the following five hundred times: ‘Only a chicken would steal an egg from his friend.’”

  “Only a chicken . . . gosh, Hank, what if I can’t remember all that?”

  “This afternoon, I’ll give you a test to make sure you memorized it. If you flunk, then you will have crossed over the line between Serious Trouble and Very Serious Trouble. I wouldn’t want to speculate on the consequences of that.”

  “Oh darn. Well, if I admit I ate your eggs, would you let me off without any punishment?”

  “Negative. There’s no plea bargaining on this ranch—not while I’m in charge and not when I’ve been looted by my own employees. Now go, and shame on you for a whole hour.”

  Drover hung his head and went padding down to the gas tanks. I watched the little mutt and hoped the punishment wasn’t too severe. I only wanted to break his bad habits, not his spirit.

  There are times, up here at the top, when a guy is tempted to soften his position on crime and punishment. But part of being a cowdog and a Head of Ranch Security lies in being just a little tougher than your average run of dogs.

  Drover was the one with egg on his face, and now the foot was on the other shoe.

  Chapter Four: Bacon Grease over Burned Toast Makes a Lousy Breakfast

  Once Drover had left to go serve his time in jail, I turned my attention back to the scene before me.

  There was Greedy-gut the Cat, eating my juicy bacon ends. As you may know, cats don’t have a real good set of chewing teeth. Their teeth are more like spikes or needles—better for inflicting pain on innocent children than the teeth of a dog, but not as good for crushing bones or chewing meat.

  In other words, I still had some hope that Pete would choke on my bacon. Stranger things have happened in this old world. If you’ve ever watched a cat eating, you, know that they often yowl while they chew. Also, they don’t chew their food twenty-one times. They’ll hit it four, five, or six times, then try to swaller it whole—yowling and growling at the same time.

  And sometimes they choke.

  I didn’t wish Pete any bad luck, but if he had strangled himself on my bacon, he would have improved the world and served the cause of justice—also saved some juicy bacon ends for certain observers whose names we don’t need to mention.

  I waited and watched and hoped. The longer I waited and watched and hoped, the more I began to realize that this would not be a lucky day for the ranch, for the cat devoured my breakfast and didn’t choke.

  At that point in my career, I began looking around for secondary options, such as the two pieces of burned toast lying on the ground before me. I sniffed them. I took one of them in my mouth and gummed it around before spitting it out.

  Whether you gum it or chew it or sniff it, burned toast remains basically burned toast.

  But just then, I saw Sally May come out of the house with an orange juice can in her hand. She walked past the cat, who was now licking his hind leg with long strokes of his tongue, and proceeded to the south corner of the fence. She leaned across the fence and poured the contents of the orange juice can out on the ground.

  Hmm. Why would Sally May be pouring orange juice out on the ground? That didn’t make sense. Something strange was going on here, and I needed to check it out.

  I went slipping down the fence. Sally May saw me. I stopped.

  “No, Hank. It’s just bacon grease. It’s messy, and it’ll make you sick if you eat it. Now go on.”

  Oh. Bacon grease. Hmm, yes. I could smell it now. Smelled pretty good. Smelled VERY good. Bacon grease may not be exactly the same as bacon, but at a distance one smells about as good as another.

  I waited for Sally May to go back into the house. Little Alfred had come out by then and she told him not to get dirty because the kinfolks would be arriving in an hour. Then she went inside.

  I slipped back to the spot where I had left the two pieces of charred toast, picked one up in my enormous jaws, glanced around to make sure Sally May wasn’t looking, and made my way south down the fence. The further I went, the stronger that bacon smell became. By the time I reached the spot, I could almost taste it.

  Now, it didn’t look all that great, I’ll have to admit that. When you pour cold bacon grease out on the ground, it looks like something you wouldn’t want to eat. But the aroma . . . that’s the important thing. Looks ain’t everything in this old world.

  See, I had worked out this very clever strategy in my mind. Listen to this. If a guy is denied real bacon and is left with nothing to eat but burned toast, he can sop the toast in the grease. While making efficient use of the resources at hand, he also fools his taste buds by making them think he’s eating bacon, see.

  Pretty shrewd. No cat in history has ever come up with a plan that good.

  Well, I took one last glance around to make sure that the, uh, Kitchen Police weren’t watching, then I dropped the toast right into the middle of the brown blob . . . into the bacon grease, I should say. I oozed it around, flipped it over, and let the other side soak up . . .

  You know, that stuff smelled so wonderful that my mouth began to water. It’s hard to express a dog’s deep yearning for bacon. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d experienced the savage delight of gobb
ling bacon, nor could I remember a single time in my long and glorious career when I had had at my disposal all the bacon I wanted or could eat.

  I postponed the first bite as long as I could. I mean, that’s part of the fun of eating—knowing you’ve got the goodies there in front of you but forbidding yourself from diving into it.

  I sniffed it. I licked my chops. I drooled over it. I rehearsed that first bite over and over in my mind. I was just about ready to begin the procedure when I heard a voice.

  “You’d better not eat that bacon grease, Hankie. It’ll make you sick.”

  That was Pete. He was sitting on the other side of the fence, purring, twitching the end of his tail, and staring at me with his big cattish eyes.

  “Oh yeah? Who says?”

  “Me. And Sally May.”

  “Sally May’s opinion carried some weight around here until you started quoting her, and that just about ruined it.”

  “Truth is truth, Hankie, regardless of who says it.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, I’ve got one better for you. Truth is truth until it comes from the mouth of a cat. There’s no truth so true that a cat can’t twist it into a falsehood.”

  He blinked and smiled. “Well, if I felt that way about it, Hankie, I’d eat all that bacon grease.”

  “Would you? That’s very interesting, cat, because that’s just what I’m fixing to do.” I chuckled and gave him a wink. “You see, Kitty-Kitty, I understand your little scheme. You think I’ll do the opposite of anything you say, right? You tell me to eat all the bacon grease, I eat none of it, I walk away and leave it all for you, right?”

  “I was just trying to be helpful, Hankie.”

  “Oh Pete, it hurts me to see you slipping. This game of yours is old and tired. I mean, okay, maybe it worked once or twice, but that was years ago. Life goes on, cat. You can’t toot your own horn if you’ve only got one string on your fiddle.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors, Hankie.”