The Case of the Midnight Rustler

by John R. Erickson

  (Let me pause here to mention that, in some ways, Molly was a weird little kid. I mean, she ate things like dirt and leaves and twigs. And bugs. Shucks, I once saw her chewing on the trunk of a tree. Can you imagine that? A little girl trying to eat a whole tree? Maybe she was part beaver, I don’t know.)

  Anyways, she had this black beetle clutched in her plump little fist, and she’d already made up her mind to eat that rascal, but Sally May had other ideas and was trying to pry open her fist.

  I figgered this might be a good time for me to shake all the loose water out of my coat. Every once in a while we dogs will drip-dry, but it’s usually better to shake. It’s a little more trouble but better in the long run.

  Cuts down on the chances of getting the sniffles. As much as we use our noses in the Security Business, we sure don’t need the sniffles.

  So I closed my eyes, extended my tail, and went into the shaking maneuver, shook every inch of hair and tissue between the tip of my nose and the end of my tail. It was a heck of a good shake, but suddenly the peace and tranquility of the moment were interrupted by a piercing scream.

  Over the years I have observed that for every scream, there is a screamer. That scream didn’t just happen. It had been caused by something, and I had a pretty good idea what it was.

  Sally May had gotten a good look at that bug and it had scared the daylights out of her.

  Well, you know where I stand on the matter of Ladies in Distress. Nothing in this world calls me into action quicker than the scream of a lady in distress, especially if she happens to be my master’s wife.

  In a flash, I had cancelled the Shake Program and had gone into Manual Hair Lift-Up and switched over to Double Baritone Bark. Pretty impressive, huh? But that wasn’t all. In the midst of all this switching of programs and circuits, I somehow found an opening of time to leap into Sally May’s lap and give her my biggest, juiciest, most comforting lick on the face.

  How did I manage to accomplish all of that in the space of just a few seconds? I can’t tell you. Somehow it all comes together at the right time. It goes back to our rigorous training, I suppose.

  Training, self-discipline, physical conditioning, and the kind of protective instincts you expect to find in a top-of-the-line cowdog.

  I have no idea why she turned on me like she did. I mean, we’re talking about wild eyes and flared nostrils and clenched teeth, and do you believe that she actually SLUGGED ME ON THE NOSE?

  Yes sir, delivered a roundhouse right that landed between my nose and upper teeth. I never would have believed that a proper lady would actually slug a dog, but this one did.

  She gave a howl of pain and began shaking the very fist that had almost sent me into the next county. And then she screeched at me. Yes, screeched in a very loud and ugly tone, and to be honest about it, the screeching hurt me worse than the actual blow.

  Well, maybe not. It was a heck of a punch, came all the way from the horse pasture, seemed to me, and it did cause my lights to blink there for a while.

  But she screeched at me. “GET AWAY FROM MY BABY, YOU STINKING FLEABAG!!”

  Boy, that hurt, it really did. Sometimes a dog wonders what it takes to please these people. I mean, you devote every waking hour to . . . oh well.

  And then she screeched again, while I was trying my best to get out of her range. “Slim, either get this dog out of here or bring me the shotgun!”

  Holy smokes, the mention of the shotgun cleared my head faster than smelling sauce, and even though I was still seeing sparklers and checkers and strange patterns of light behind my eyes, I took this opportunity to tuck my tail and scramble for safety under Slim’s pickup.

  I made it, and lucky for me, she didn’t try to crawl under there to get me.

  You know, I never did figger out what had lit her fuse. Baby Molly ended up eating the bug. Maybe that was it, but with these women, you never know.

  Chapter Five: Maybe I Stunk but Slim Got Bucked Off

  So there I was, hiding under the pickup. Slim bent down and twisted his head so that our eyes met. I whapped my tail on the ground, as if to say, “I’m innocent, honest. All I did was . . .”

  He grinned. “Old Sally May packs a pretty mean right hand, don’t she? Ha! Don’t know as I ever saw her punch out a dog before. You’ve sure got a way with the ladies, pooch. Reminds me of me.”

  He hung the gas nozzle back on its baling-wire hook on the southwest angle-iron leg of the gas tanks. Then he climbed into the pickup and called out, “Come on, Stinkbomb. You ride in the back.”

  Riding in the back was fine with me, and it had nothing to do with me being a so-called “Stinkbomb.” Any ranch dog worth talking about will ride in the back of the pickup where the wind can blow his ears around and he can see what’s going on in the world.

  And just for the record, let me state that I didn’t care for the way HE smelled either. At least I took a bath every day.

  We turned right at the mailbox and drove to Slim’s place, down the creek a mile or so from head­quarters. He lived in that shack beneath the cottonwoods, the one that was covered with tar-paper because he and Loper had never gotten around to putting on the siding.

  They hate any kind of work that involves a hammer. Let me rephrase that: They hate any kind of work that involves work, and I’m not saying that just because Slim had called me a so-called “Stink­bomb,” although that did strike a sensitive nerve.

  We puffed up to the front door, which faced the creek on the east, and he went inside. As he closed the screen door behind him, he turned back to me and said, “You stay out here, Rosebud.”

  Okay, that did it. I’d had it up to HERE with his name-calling and his cutting, cruel, childish remarks. By George, if he didn’t like the way I smelled, he could just try to catch the rustlers without me.

  You know what I did? I quit! Yes sir, right then and there, I walked off the job. I set my course in a southwesterly direction and said good-bye to a crummy job on a crummy third-rate ranch and . . .

  “Come here, Hank! Scraps.”

  . . . and, what the heck, he wasn’t such a bad guy after all, and the least I could do was give him another chance. I, uh, went back to the porch and patched up our friendship over a plate of last night’s cold greasy potatoes.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m no pushover. I won’t always settle for cold greasy potatoes, but he’d caught me at the right moment and somebody had to walk that extra mile to keep the friendship alive. Fortunately, I didn’t have to walk a whole mile.

  So we made our peace, Slim and I. While I wolfed down the cold ’taters and licked the plate (that was a special favor to him, since I knew how much he hated washing dishes), while I cleaned up the dishes, he started putting together his camping gear.

  There was quite a lot of it: a tent, his cowboy bedroll, a gas lantern, fishing gear, pots and pans, cans of food, a yellow slicker, an axe, and a full box of Twinkies.

  When he had it all loaded on the back of the pickup, he drove down to the corral, poured some sweet feed into several feed bunks, and whistled to his horses. They came at a trot, but before they could eat, they had to go through their usual mealtime ritual of biting, squealing, and kicking each other.

  Horses are such gluttons. Have we discussed horses? I don’t like ’em. Not only do they fight over every flake of corn, but they will go out of their way to attack and harass an innocent dog.

  I glared at them through the boards of the corral fence. If one of them had dared to come within range, I would have nipped him on the fetlocks. It’s a procedure I’ve developed over the years—shooting my neck through the space between the two bottom boards and giving them a good stern bite before they know what’s happening—and it DOES get their attention.

  Yes, every now and then a guy gets kicked, but with these horses, you’ve got to take what you can get.

  While the horses were
eating and biting each other, Slim carried a packsaddle out of the shed and brushed the dust off of it. He haltered Jughead, the green colt, and tied the lead rope to a stout post. Then he started rigging him up with the packsaddle.

  When he’d tightened the cinch, he stepped back and said, “Well, that wasn’t so bad. I’d thought we might see a little rodeo.”

  Then he started piling on the camping gear. When he’d gotten the load balanced, he covered it with a tarp and lashed it down, stepped back to admire his work and said, “Now ain’t that a pretty load, Hank?”

  I barked. It looked pretty good to me.

  Then he threw a saddle on old Dunny, his favorite usin’ horse, and we were ready to set out on a new adventure. Slim opened the corral gate and stepped up into the saddle. Holding Jughead’s lead rope in his right hand, he nudged Dunny with the spurs and started toward the open gate.

  Jughead didn’t move. Slim tried several times to coax him into a walk, but the colt had decided that he didn’t want to go camping, thank you. Slim pulled his hat down tight and said, “Okay, it looks like we’ll have to go to Plan B. Stand by for action, Hank. This may get a little western.”

  I stood by for action.

  He circled Dunny around and got some slack in the lead rope. Then he dallied the rope around the saddlehorn, took a deep breath, jabbed old Dunny with the spurs, and yelled, “Bite him, Hank!”

  At that point things began to happen real fast. Jughead had pretty muchly made up his mind that he wasn’t going to move, but when the slack went out of that lead rope, he got several surprises.

  The first was that Dunny weighed 1,150 pounds, and when he got all those pounds moving in one direction, whatever was tied onto him was likely to move with him. The colt braced his legs, went back on the rope, fought like a tiger, and got jerked halfway across the corral.

  The second surprise came when I shot under the bottom board of the fence and went on the attack. After I’d tattooed his hind legs several times with my teeth, he decided that leaving the barn might be a pretty good idea.

  I love biting horses. I’d rather bite a horse than eat a bone, to tell you the truth.

  Yes sir, we had our little parade moving in the right direction. Only trouble was that once we got Jughead moved off of high center, he went to pitching and tried to shuck that packsaddle off his back.

  And once Jughead started bucking, Dunny must have thought that sounded like fun, ’cause he started bucking too, and all at once old Slim had his hands full of broncs.

  I think one bronc would have been plenty. If he’d dropped Jughead’s rope and concentrated on lining out Dunny, he’d have been prouder of his ride, but Slim was stubborn and hated to give slack to that smart-aleck colt, and he kept his dallies tight and tried to ride out the storm.

  He did all right through the first five jumps, but halfway around the horse-pasture fence, he ran out of saddle glue. I knew what was coming when I saw him lose his left stirrup. The right stirrup was the next to go, followed a moment later by Slim himself.

  When Dunny planted his front feet in the ground and dropped his head, Slim flew south, Dunny went west, and Jughead bucked off to the east.

  The dust was so thick that I had to move around to get a better view. Through the cloud of dust, I saw old Slim dog-paddling over the top of Dunny’s ears. After a short flight, he landed face-first in the middle of a clump of sagebrush.

  At that point, I did what any loyal cowdog would do—rushed to the scene of the crash and administered an emergency Red Cross lick on the face. It must have worked. Slim sat up, grabbed a handful of dirt, and threw it in Jughead’s direction.

  My goodness, he looked a little mussed. One side of his face was covered with dust, while the other had taken on the color of fresh sagebrush. His glasses had come to rest on his upper lip and there was a new crease in his hat.

  He sat there for a moment, staring at the toes of his boots, while I stared at his socks, which showed through the holes in the bottoms. He was wearing one white sock and one red sock, which I thought was kind of interesting.

  “You know, I didn’t think that dun horse could buck me off.” He smiled, revealing a set of dirt-covered teeth. “But I’ll bet he ain’t horse enough to do it twice in one day.” He picked himself up off the ground and moaned. “Say, that old dirt feels harder than it used to.”

  He limped over and caught Dunny’s reins, tightened the cinch and swung aboard. “You old fool, you want to buck? Try that one more time and we’ll see who’s the champion on this ranch.”

  He leaned back in the saddle, slapped Dunny across the ears with his hat, raked him with the spurs, and squalled, “Go to it, son!”

  Dunny snorted and went to work and . . . I’m sorry to report that Slim didn’t quite make it to the whistle. I arrived on the scene just as the dust cloud was drifting away. Slim appeared to be hugging a sagebrush, and he had lost his hat.

  I licked him on the ear. He raised his head and pushed me away. “Well, I told him to buck and he sure did. This time, I think I’ll encourage him NOT to buck and see what happens. I’d hate for him to make a habit of that.”

  He caught the horse and talked to him for a minute, swung up into the saddle, loped him around the pasture in a figure eight, and warmed him up, which he probably should have done to start with.

  Then he picked up the pack horse and we headed off to the north. The rodeo was over, and now we were riding off to a new adventure—catching rustlers in the canyon.

  Chapter Six: The Case of the Poisoned Weenies

  It was a beautiful day to be setting out on an adventure, with a nice breeze out of the southeast and a few puffy clouds floating along overhead.

  We’d had some good spring rains, and the country north of Wolf Creek sure had its Sunday clothes on. The buffalo grass was tall and green, the beargrass had put out its white blooms, and the hills showed splashes of red, yellow, and purple where the wildflowers grew.

  We didn’t take the most direct route to the canyon pasture, and it took me a while to figger out why. Then I realized that Slim didn’t want to leave any tracks on the main trail. So instead of entering the canyon from the south, we looped up north a ways and came in from that direction, taking a narrow cow trail down to the bottom of the canyon.

  Say, that was a wild and lonesome place. I’d done a little exploring of that canyon farther down, where the walls weren’t quite as high and steep, but I’d never felt very comfortable about being there.

  And for good reason. Those canyons were famous for growing the biggest, meanest, hungriest coyotes in Ochiltree County, and on our way down the canyon rim, I found it convenient to, shall we say, keep very little distance between me and the horses.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m no chicken liver, but I’d had enough experience with those wild coyote warriors to know that they could sure mess up a dog’s camping trip.

  It was along about five in the evening when we reached the spot where Slim wanted to make camp. It was near the head of the canyon, close to a spring-fed pool of water, and with enough old dead wood around to feed a campfire.

  He hobbled the horses in a grassy flat and pitched his little two-man pup tent . . . or was it a two-pup man tent? One or the other, I can’t remember, but it was just about the right size for two men or two pups or one man and one pup.

  Anyways, he pitched the tent, rolled out my bed (I didn’t know where HE planned to sleep, but I staked my claim on that bedroll right away), got a fire going in the fire pit, and made a pot of coffee.

  By this time the sun had dropped behind the west rim of the canyon and the shadows were getting long. He brought out his cast-iron skillet and started supper. He cooked up some bacon and used the grease to fry some potatoes and weenies.

  That was his supper: bacon, fried potatoes, and weenies. I watched him eat, and he even pitched me a bite or two, but to tell you the truth
, I’ve never been crazy about weenies.

  Oh, they taste all right at first, but after you eat a couple of ’em, what you begin to notice is the garlic. Me and garlic don’t get along. So it didn’t bother me at all that Slim ate most of the burned weenies himself, and by then it was getting dark and he went to work cleaning up the supper mess and . . .

  Hmm, he had left the open package of weenies sitting there on a rock. I wondered if he had left them there for a reason or if . . .

  Slim wasn’t what you’d call a careless person. Okay, maybe he WAS a careless person but not so careless that he would leave an open package of weenies sitting on a rock without a reason.

  What could this mean? I watched him as he wiped out his skillet and put things away and began fiddling with his gas lantern. He showed no interest whatsoever in the package of weenies.

  Hmmmmm.

  At last I narrowed the range of explanations down to two. Explanation One: He had left the weenies out on purpose and was conducting a test of my willpower. Explanation Two: He had left them out on purpose, knowing that I had worked up an appetite and that dogs must eat.

  Okay, the next step was to devise a clever test that would narrow the range of possibilities down to one. I scooted myself closer to the alleged weenies and gave them a good sniffing, and, by George, they smelled pretty good, but the point of the experiment was to see if Slim would snatch them away and say, “Oh no you don’t, pooch!”

  He said nothing of the kind. In fact, he said nothing. He didn’t notice. Or to frame it up more in line with the experiment, he had almost certainly put them there hoping that I would help myself.

  That made sense. I mean, he was a busy guy. I had no right to expect him to stop what he was doing and feed me every bite of supper.

  I gave the weenies another sniffing. Holy smokes, those things smelled WONDERFUL! I love weenies, always have. Give me a choice be­tween a package of raw weenies and a package of raw steak and I’ll take weenies every time, especially if there’s no package of steak around.