“They vanished, remember? I told you they were probably stolen by a chicken hawk, remember? Well, that was a small lie.”
“You mean . . .”
“Yes. I did it. I stole them in daily broadlight. I couldn’t resist, I couldn’t help myself, I became a victim of this . . . this terrible urge, and yes, Drover, I STOLE THE STEAKS!”
“Yeah, but that was months ago.”
“But you’re forgetting one small detail: they were Sally May’s steaks. She never forgets anything, she holds a grudge for years and years.”
“So you think . . .”
“Yes. She turned us in to the Mounties, and now the chickens have come home to rot. We may spend the rest of our lives behind bars—all because you failed me in my hour of greatest need!”
“Yeah, but I didn’t eat ’em.”
“But you did something worse, Drover. You knew I had a fatal weakness for steaks and you didn’t stop me.”
“I wasn’t even there!”
“That’s my whole point. If you’d been there . . .”
We felt the pickup slowing down. We exchanged glances with big moon-shaped eyes. Or to put it more accurately, Drover’s eyes were moon-shaped, and although I couldn’t actually see my own eyes, I had every reason to think they were every bit as moon-shaped as Drover’s.
We heard the crunch of loose gravel as the pickup pulled over to the side of the road. The pickup came to a stop. Slim shut off the engine. The Mountie shut off his siren. A deadly silence moved over us. Then . . .
Chapter Six: We Are Arrested by the Canadian Mounties
I heard the sound of a car door opening, then the sound of the door as it slammed shut. The crackle of the police radio. Footsteps approaching the pickup.
My mouth was dry. I felt needles of fear moving down my spine bone and out to the end of my tail. The long arm of Sally May had finally caught up with me.
Us, I should say. The long arm of Sally May had finally caught up with us.
I turned to Drover. “Drover, no matter what happens here, I want you to know that this was mostly your fault. If you’d been a true friend, you would have told me to leave those steaks alone.”
He was almost in tears by now. “All these weeks and months I’ve felt so guilty about something, and now I know what it was! I feel terrible!”
“I understand, and if it would make you feel better to take the rap for this, I guess that would be all right with me.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to go to jail!”
“You should have thought of that months ago. Part of growing up and becoming a mature dog is accepting the consequences of my own behavior. I’m sorry.”
“But what about my leg?”
“You’ll just have to take it to jail with you. And always remember . . .”
I wasn’t able to give Drover his Lesson for the Day, because . . .
The footsteps drew closer and closer. I could hear our hearts and livers pounding. We dogs closed our eyes and waited to hear those dreaded words that would change our lives forever: “Come out with your hands up! In the name of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, you dogs are under arrest!”
But you know what? That’s not what we heard. What we heard was, “Morning. May I see your driver’s license please?”
And then Slim’s voice said, “Shore. Let me see, it’s s’posed to be here in my wallet . . . good honk, there’s that rodeo ticket I couldn’t find two years ago. Here we are.”
Officer: “Thank you. Slim, is this your current address?”
Slim: “Well, it was until about an hour ago. I sort of retired from my ranch job and was on my way to Alpine. Thought I might find some cowboy work down there.”
Officer: “I see. Well, Slim, I’ve got some bad news.”
Slim: “Uh-oh. What did I do this time?”
Officer: “Well, the taillights don’t work on your pickup.”
Slim: “I’ve been meaning to . . .”
Officer: “And the tag’s expired.”
Slim: “Oops.”
Officer: “And your inspection sticker expired two years ago.”
Slim: “The same year I lost my ticket to the rodeo. Boy, time gets away, don’t it?”
Officer: “So you’re driving a vehicle that’s about as illegal as it can be. I guess you won’t be going to Alpine for a while.”
Slim: “Do they feed good at the jail?”
Officer: “Ha. There’s no need for that, but dang it, Slim, if you’re going to drive a vehicle on Texas highways, you’ve got to follow the rules.”
Slim: “Yes sir, I know you’re right, but I’ve got a little problem. I’ve got just enough cash to buy gas to Alpine, and that’s it.”
Officer: “Well . . . that’s a problem, sure enough. I guess you’d better park this thing here in Canadian and find a job. With fines and fees, you’re going to need about a hundred bucks—and that’s with me giving you warning tickets instead of citations.”
Slim: “I’m mighty grateful.”
The officer spent the next ten minutes writing out Slim’s warning tickets. Slim didn’t say a word. Neither did we dogs. We kept still, even though I was feeling a whole lot better about this deal. Do you see what this meant? Sally May hadn’t sent the law after us after all, and we wouldn’t be spending the rest of our lives behind bars! Boy, what a relief.
Well, the officer wrote out the tickets and handed them to Slim and said, “Well, are you planning a big Christmas?”
“Oh yeah. Huge. Thanks, officer. I’ll park this thing, like you said.”
“Fine. Oh, and Slim, if you’re going to be in town for a spell, I’d advise you to get tags for your dogs.”
“Dogs? What dogs?”
Slim opened the door and stepped out. All at once we noticed . . . that is, we became aware of his, uh, face peering over the edge of the pickup bed. He didn’t look very happy, to tell you the truth, and all at once I felt a powerful urge to . . . well, switch my tail over to Slow Whaps. And I squeezed up a little smile that said, “Hey, Slim. Bad day, huh? Well, at least you’ve got us dogs.”
The officer got into his car and drove away. Slim stood there for several minutes, shaking his head and moving his lips. Then he turned his glare back on us.
“You birdbrains. Didn’t I have enough trouble without y’all . . . oh brother. Loper probably thinks I stole his dogs.”
He looked so pitiful, I hopped out of the pickup and went to him. He reached down a hand and stroked me on the ears. “Didn’t I tell y’all you couldn’t come? See, I had to leave the ranch. They couldn’t afford to keep a hired man on the place but they didn’t have the heart to fire me. I just couldn’t stand the thought of being a burden. Now you’ve made a mess and . . . and I don’t know what to do.”
He stood there for a long time, shaking his head and talking under his breath while cars and trucks whizzed by on the highway. He sure looked lost and alone. I jumped up on him and nuzzled my face into his hands.
At last he spoke. “Now, here’s the way it looks to me. I’m gonna have to live in this pickup until I can find me some work. I’ll find a pay phone and call Loper and tell him about you dogs. Now we’re cookin’. We’ve got us a plan.” He hitched up his jeans and looked down at me. “Well, let’s load up. I guess we’re gonna be together for a while, for better or worse. Get in the back, Hank.”
I jumped into the back and joined Mister Moon Eyes. “Drover, at last I’ve got this thing worked out. Listen closely so that I don’t have to repeat myself.”
“What?”
“I said, repeat this closely so that I don’t have to listen to myself. Are you ready?”
“I guess.”
“Okay. We were on our way to the Alpine Alps but we didn’t make it because Slim meant to do something but didn’t. We’re in Canadian but that has nothi
ng to do with Canada. Is that clear?”
“Not really. What about all those penguins and Mounties?”
“They were fignewtons of your imagination.” The pickup lurched out into the street, throwing us toward the back. “Any more questions?”
“What about Sally May’s steaks?”
Slim put in the clutch and shifted gears, which threw us against the cab.
“They’re still missing, Drover, and we’ve gone back to our original theory. They must have been stolen by a chicken hawk, a sneaking, thieving chicking hawk.”
“Oh good. The guilt was about to get me down.”
Slim shifted again, throwing us toward the back.
I raised my voice over the roar of the engine. “I wish he’d learn to drive this thing! It’s hard for a dog to carry on an intelligent conversation back here!”
He slammed on his brakes and sent us tumbling forward. I found myself standing nose-to-nose with Drover.
He grinned. “Oh, hi. It’s hard to stand up back here, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it certainly is, and just for that, I think I’ll lie down.”
“Yeah, me too. That’ll teach him.”
And so it was that we lodged our protests against the driver by flopping down. That put an end to all our sloshing around and claw-scraping. It also ended our conversation, which was fine with me. I had explained our situation as clearly as I could, and it was now up to Drover to make sense of it.
Slim drove into the center of town, made a left turn at the stoplight, and drove up the main street, which was built on a steep hill. Halfway up, he tried to shift down to a lower gear but missed. The pickup chugged and died, and we began rolling backward down the hill.
I leaped to my feet and barked. “What the heck is he doing now?”
Lucky for us there weren’t any cars back there, so we weren’t killed in a wreck. What happened was that, after rolling back down the hill fifty feet or so, Slim slammed on his brakes, which sent me crashing nosefirst into the tail endgate. Did it hurt? You bet it did. Try it sometime and see if it doesn’t hurt.
Through watering eyes, I beamed a gaze of righteous anger toward the cab. Slim stuck his head out the window and gave me a big grin. “Hang on, dogs! We’ll give ’er one more try.” He stuffed the gear shift lever up into grandma low, and off we went.
At this point, the G-forces became so powerful they caused Drover to come sliding down to the endgate. He gave me his patented silly grin. “Oh, hi. We move around a lot, don’t we?”
“Yes, and I’ll tell you something else, Drover. Sometimes I get the feeling that Slim doesn’t show us the proper respect when we ride in the back. He may even be doing it on purpose. Can you believe a grown man would show so little respect to his dogs?”
“Yeah, and he’s lucky to have us.”
“He certainly . . .” By then, we had made it to the top of the hill. Slim pulled into a parking spot in front of the courthouse . . . and would you like to guess what he did? He slammed on his stupid brakes and sent me flying against the cab again! Drover was still sitting, and he slid all the way to the front.
Okay, that did it. I was outraged. When he stepped out of the cab, I met him with a glare of purest steel. I wanted him to know what I thought of his childish, infantile behavior.
Do you think he took the hint—that it’s hard for a dog to maintain his dignity when he’s staggering around in the back of his own pickup? Do you think he showed even the smallest shred of shame or remorse? Ha.
Would you like to hear what he said? Here it is, word for word.
He said, “Pooch, if you’re gonna be a ranch dog, you need to learn how to ride in the back of a pickup.” And then he chuckled.
He thinks he’s so funny. Well, he’s not. It would have served him right if I had . . . but then he tore off a piece of beef jerky and pitched it to me, and what the heck, he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. I caught it in midair and wolfed it down.
I won’t say that the jerky totally healed my wounded pride, but it helped a bunch. One of us had to show some maturity in these deals, and as long as the supply of jerky held out, I figured I could handle it.
Chapter Seven: Slim Finds a New Career
Pretty good stuff, that jerky. Did you know that Slim made his own? He did. He cut the meat up into strips, sprinkled it with his own blend of spices, and . . .
HOT PEPPER?
Suddenly my mouth was in flames and my eyes were watering.
What kind of moron would ruin a piece of jerky by covering it with . . . that stuff was burning my mouth up! I began pawing at my mouth, trying to get the flames away from my tongue and lips. My eyes were watering, my nose was running, my whole mouth and tongue and lips were being consumed by a raging fire.
Slim chuckled. “I call that my Range Fire Jerky, pooch. What do you think?”
I thought . . . I thought that was the worst garbage I’d ever had in my mouth, and I should have known better than to eat anything made by a bachelor cowboy, and he sure as thunder didn’t need to worry about ME trying to steal any of his . . .
He pitched a piece of it in Drover’s direction. Just for a moment, I forgot all my pain and so forth and prepared myself for some fun. He’s a gulper, you know, Drover is. He’ll gulp down any old thing, eats like a hog, only this time the little dunce sniffed it and crawled off into a corner.
Slim shook his head. “Dumb dog.” And then he walked up to the courthouse to buy a newspaper.
Never eat any of Slim’s jerky.
And don’t ride in the back of his pickup either.
I had terrible indigestion for the rest of the day, but that’s not why Slim bought the newspaper. He bought it to see if there were any ranch jobs listed in the classified ads.
He let down the tail endgate and used it for a seat, spread out the paper, and frowned over the classified section. The longer he read, the deeper his frown became. At last he raised up, pushed his hat to the back of his head, and said, “Boys, with this dadgum cattle market like it is, ranch jobs are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Man alive, I don’t know . . .”
Then his eye fell on something on the page. He leaned down and squinted at it. “I’ll be derned. Lookie here. It’s an ad for Leonard’s Saddle Shop. You don’t reckon old Leonard moved his shop over to Canadian, do you? Heck, it’s just right down the street. Might be worth a try.”
His expression darkened as he looked at us. What was the deal? What had we done? We’d just been sitting there like perfect dogs . . . with our mouths on fire. Or my mouth. Drover had managed to dodge that bullet, so he’d been staring at the clouds.
But the point is, Slim had no reason to be glaring at us. But he was.
“Now dogs, I’m going to hike down to Leonard’s Saddle Shop. If y’all can act halfway civilized, I’ll take you with me, but you’ve got to mind and be good, hear?”
Drover and I traded glances, and I whapped my tail several times. No problem. We took a solemn oath to be Dogs That Would Make Our Master Proud. I mean, who wants to sit in the back of a pickup when there are exciting places to explore? Not me, and if the price for going was to be a perfect, obedient dog, I was ready to give it a shot.
And besides, he hadn’t actually said we had to be perfect. He’d said, and this is a direct quote, he’d said we had to “act halfway civilized.” You bet, no problem.
And so we set out walking down the hill, looking into every store window and checking out all the sights of town. Drover and I followed behind Slim. I mean, you’d have thought we were a couple of those high-dollar border collies that have been to college and stuff.
We hadn’t gone far when we passed a pay phone on the curb. Slim stopped, snapped his fingers, and walked over to it. “Almost forgot, I need to call Loper and tell him where his dogs are. And I wonder how his deal with the banker went. Probably not so good.”
He dug into his jeans pocket and came out with a quarter. He dropped it into the slot, listened to the jingle it made, and dialed the number. He waited. And waited. A scowl gathered on his brow, and the longer he waited, the deeper and darker it got. He held the receiver away from his ear and said something to it, then slammed it down in the holder.
He waited for his quarter to come back, but it didn’t. I could see that he was getting mad. He rattled the receiver and banged on the box. The quarter didn’t come back, and by now he was really steamed. His eye fell on a piece of paper lying in the gutter. He stomped over to it, snatched it up, wrote a message on it with a ballpoint pen, and fixed it to the phone, where everyone could see it. It said:
“THIS PHONE IS A LIAR AND A THEEF, IT STOLD A QUARTER FROM A UNUMPLOYED COWBOY WHO NEEDED IT!!!!!!”
He stepped back and read his work, then shot a glance at us dogs. “There, by grabs, that’ll teach ’em.”
We continued our walk down the street, until we came to a store window that said “Leonard’s Saddle Shop. Saddles, Ropes, Tack, Chaps, and Boot Repair. A Cowboy Place.” Slim didn’t go in right away. He squinted his eyes and peered into the window. It was fairly dark inside and he didn’t see anyone, so he paced for a while and grumbled under his breath.
At last he worked up enough courage to take a harder look. He went to the glass door, cupped his hands around his eyes, and pressed his face against the glass. All at once the door flew open and there stood Leonard, a smallish man with beady little eyes, who was wearing black cowboy boots and a dirty apron.
He didn’t appear too friendly at first. He glared at us dogs, then at Slim, and a crooked smile formed on his lips. “Well, I knew it was a country fool, leaving nose prints on my front door.” He wiped the glass door with his shirt sleeve. “Howdydoo, Slim, get yourself in here. It’s been a while. Sit down there by the stove and warm your bones.”
He held open the door and . . . well, he hadn’t exactly invited us dogs to come in, but he hadn’t told us not to, so you might say that we . . . well, made a run for the stove.
Slim's Goodbye Page 4