The Case of the Bone-Stalking Monster (2 page)

Chapter Two: The Cat Tries to Steal My T-Bones

I
couldn't help feeling just a little angry that I had wasted the best part of the morning trying to be a good dog and showing sympathy for my cowboy pals.

I mean, we try to help them out and share their little sorrows, but there's a limit to how sad a dog can feel about holey socks and reindeer snouts. Down deep, where it really counts, I just don't care about either subject.

I'm sorry.

And I was way behind in my work and beginning to feel the awesome weight of responsibility that came with my job. Running a ranch is no cup of worms, let me tell you, and I still had eighteen hours of work to do before I slept.

I hurried past the front gate, headed down the caliche hill, past that cottonwood tree that was just beginning to put out a few spring leaves, past the . . .

Suddenly I heard a sound. A voice. A child's voice. Little Alfred's voice, to be exact, and here's what he said: “Hee-oo, kitty kitty. Hee-oo, Petie. Come for scwaps.”

I went to Full Air Brakes and skidded to a stop. Scwaps? My ears shot up to Full and Undivided Attention, for you see, I had just broken the code of a very important transmission. You probably weren't aware of this, but “scwaps” in Kid Lan­guage means “scraps” to the rest of us.

My goodness, I had just stumbled into a conspiracy of major portions. It appeared that Little Alfred, who or whom I had always considered my special pal, was about to offer delicious scraps to my least favorite character on the ranch: Pete the Cheat, Pete the Sneaking Little Barncat.

I was stunned, shocked beyond recognition. Wounded. Devustated . . . devvusstated . . . davastated . . . deeply hurt, shall we say.

Gee whiz, Alfred and I had been through SO MUCH together, yet now he had turned against his very best friend in the whole world and was about to offer MY scraps to the cat!

Oh, pain! Oh, treachery! Oh, broken heart!

A lot of your ordinary dogs would have quit right there—admitted defeat and gone into mourning for several days. Not me. “Ordinary” has never been a word that applied to me.

Hey, my special friendship with Alfred was worth fighting for, and . . . okay, maybe the scraps were too, especially since the villain in this case was Kitty-Kitty.

Would I lie down and roll over and let the cat corrupt my long and meaningful friendship with Little Alfred? No sir. I would fight for my rights. I would fight for Truth and Justice and Friend­ship and Scrap Rights.

Kitty was in big trouble.

I squared my enormous shoulders and rumbled off toward the yard gate. I could see him standing there—the boy, not the cat—I could see him standing there. He held a plate in his left hand. He was grinning.

He would be shocked, of course, that I had intercepted his secret call to Mister Kitty Moocher. No doubt he had called the cat in a soft voice, hoping that we dogs would miss it. Ha! Little did he know the range and scope of our listening devicers. The same instruments that spy on turkeys can pick up the tiniest of whispers about scraps.

And so it was that I stormed over to the yard gate and broke up this shabby little conspiracy before it ever got started.

Our eyes met. Through tail wags and other modes of expression, I said to him: “Alfred, I'm shocked that you would try to hold a secret Scrap Time without consulting me. And furthermore . . .”

He cut off my furthermore with a laugh. “Hi, Hankie. I knew that if I called for the kitty, you'd come. I fooled ya, didn't I, Hankie?”

HUH?

I, uh, hardly knew how to respond. My mind was racing. My data banks whirred as I tried to make sense of his . . .

I mean, who'd ever think that an innocent child might put out false information and phony calls? If you can't trust the kids, who or whom can you trust? And what's the world coming to?

I, uh, went to Slow Wags and squeezed up a grin which said, “Hey, pal, we were on to your tricks from the very beginning. We suspected that you were operating in Backwards Code, and we just played along with it to, uh . . . what's on the plate?”

I lifted my nose and gave the air a sniffing. My goodness, when the readout came in from Data Control, we found ourselves, well, shaking with excitement, you might say, because our sensory devices had picked up fragrant waves.

Holy smokes, the kid was holding a plate of STEAK BONES!

He widened his eyes and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Hankie, guess what I've got on the pwate. Steak bones. Juicy, yummy steak bones.”

Yes, we, uh, our intelligence sources had already . . . could we hurry this up a bit?

“You want a bone?”

Well, I . . . yes, a bone would be nice. Or two or three. Or, to make things simple, maybe all of them.

He lifted a bone off the plate and waved it in front of my nose. Holy tamales, that was a fresh T-bone, saved from supper the night before! And have we discussed T-bones? I love 'em, absolutely love 'em, and oftentimes I dream about 'em at night, is how much I love 'em.

He continued to wave the bone around in front of my nose. The fragrant waves of steakness filled my nostrils. My mouth began to water. I licked my chops and hopped up on my back legs, but the little scamp pulled the bone out of my reach. And laughed.

Why was he doing this? I mean, he had a bone and I wanted a bone, so why couldn't we cut a deal and be done with it? Before I could answer that question, I suddenly realized that we had been joined by a third party.

Pete.

Pete had raised his worthless carcass out of his bed in Sally May's iris patch and had come slinking into our mists—grinning, purring, and holding his tail straight up in the air.

The mere sight of him caused my lips to rise into a snarl, for you see, I don't like cats.

“Pete, for your own safety, I must advise you not to come any closer.”

“Hmmmm. Well, hello, Hankie.”

“Hello yourself, Kitty, and also good-bye. You're walking into a potentially deadly situation here and you'd best leave.”

“Oh really?” He slithered through the yard gate, rubbed on the gate post, and then began rubbing on my front legs. “I could have sworn that Little Alfred was calling me to scraps, Hankie.”

“Wrong, Kitty. He was using Backwards Code, which means that he used your name as a code word to call me.”

“Hmmmmm, how interesting. I've never heard of Backwards Code before.”

“Of course not. You're only a cat and cats know nothing about Security Work and the many codes we use.”

“It sounds very complicated, Hankie.”

“It's complicated beyond your wildest imagination, Kitty, but the bottom line is pretty simple.”

“Oh really?” He grinned up at me and continued rubbing on my legs, which drives me nuts. “What is the bottom line, Hankie? I can't wait to hear.”

“The bottom line is that these are my scraps. You got that? MY SCRAPS. Good-bye.”

“But Hankie, if Alfred was using Backwards Code, then surely that means that the scraps are mine.” He fluttered his eyelids. “Backwards Code makes everything backwards, right?”

I cut my eyes from side to side. This was a new sneaky trick and just for a moment it caught me unprepared. At last Data Control provided me with an answer.

“Pete, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard. And stop rubbing on my legs.”

“No, it's not stupid, Hankie. Backwards Code makes everything backwards, so if Alfred said, ‘Pete, come for scraps,' what he really meant was, ‘Hankie, come for NO scraps.'”

Obviously this was no ordinary dumb cat. He was a clever ordinary dumb cat, and I had to be careful. He was trying to lure me into a trap.

Of course, there was no chance that he would succeed. I had vast experience in beating cats at their shabby little games. It was just a matter of framing up a tightly reasoned, highly logical answer to his ridiculous argument.

But before I could get that done, Little Alfred pushed the bone—MY fresh juicy T-bone—in front of the cat's nose. Pete's eyes widened, and the rest was just what you would expect from a greedy cat.

He dug his claws and sank his teeth into my bone, cut loose with a warning yowl, pinned back his ears, and began glaring ice picks at me.

Well, you know me. Do unto others but don't take trash off the cats. My patients were wearing thin.

My patients were wearing thin clothes.

My patients were growing thin.

Whatever. I was getting angry.

“Excuse me, Kitty, but you seem to have lost your mind, and you're fixing to lose parts of your body if you don't unhand my bone. Drop it, Pete. Reach for the sky.”

His yowling increased in volume, and then he HISSED at me. He shouldn't have done that. Nothing inflames a dog quite as much as hissing. It's like throwing gasoline on a fire ant.

My ears shot up. My lips rose in a deadly snarl. A growl began to rumble in my throat. And then . . .

Chapter Three: My Bones Vanish

O
ut of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Little Alfred. He was wearing a huge grin and his eyes were sparkling like . . . I don't know what. Diamonds, I suppose.

But the point is that he looked very happy about something, and all at once the pieces of the puzzle began falling into place.

The little snipe was bored and had drawn me and Kitty down into a show . . . into a showdown, I should say. In other words, he wanted us to fight over the bone. In other words, Pete and I were being used.

This threw an entirely different light on the whole situation. I turned back to the cat.

“Pete, I've just figgered this deal out. Alfred is trying to promote a fight between us. That was his purpose in using Backwards Code, to foment jealousy and envy and greed between us. Just look at yourself, Pete. He's succeeded.”

He stopped yowling and listened.

I continued. “He's appealing to our lowest in­stincts, Pete, and has brought us to the brink of open warfare. I don't know about you, but I kind of resent being used by a bratty little kid.

“I mean, we're adult dogs and cats, yet we're being tooled around by this ornery little stinkpot. I've got no grudge against you, Pete, and I think it would be a crying shame for us to go into combat over something as silly as a bone. What's a bone, Pete? The world's full of bones. This is just one of thousands, millions.

“And I ask you, Pete, sincerely and from my deepest heart: Is one measly bone worth all this? Just look what it's done to you. You've turned into a greedy, selfish, miserly little brute.”

He still had his teeth sunk into my . . . into the, uh, bone. I continued.

“I don't know about you, Pete, but I'm ashamed of myself, and I'm ashamed of yourself too. I mean, we have every reason to be friends. We share the same ranch, the same world, the same stars at night. Yet here we are, at each other's throats over a . . . over a paltry, insignificant little bone.

“Talk to me, Pete, tell me what you think. Am I right or wrong about this? I sincerely and honestly want to know your thoughts on this.”

He dropped the bone. “Well, Hankie, since you put it that way . . .”

Heh, heh. In one rapid motion, I snatched up my bone and buried Kitty beneath an avalanche of paws and claws. He never saw it coming and he never had a chance.

Okay, maybe he didn't stay buried under the avalanche for very long, and maybe he cut loose with a burst of fully-automatic catclaw fire that almost ruined my face, but I hasten to point out that he took cheap and unfair advantage of the situation.

See, my mouth was full of T-bone, the very same bone he had just tried to steal only moments before, and with my mouth full of T-bone, I wasn't able to defend my honor in the manner . . .

Man alive, I had almost forgotten how much damage a sniveling little cat could do in a very short period of time. He buzzsawed my whole face, fellers, and we're talking about lips, eyebrows, cheeks, gums, nose, the whole shebang.

At that point I abandoned the path of reason, dropped the bone, and went to Total Warfare. If Kitty-Kitty had been just half a step slower, he would have paid dearly for his crimes. Instead, I had to settle for a moral victory: I ran him all the way to the water well and chased him up a tree.

“There!” I yelled at him in a voice filled with righteous anger. “And let that be a lesson to you.”

He grinned down at me from the tree. “Yes, I've learned a valuable lesson, Hankie. Chewing on a dog's face is a lot more fun than chewing on a bone. Let's try it again some time.”

I tried to think of a stinging reply, but my face and nose were stinging so badly by then . . . I mean, he had really trashed my face, the sneaking little weasel . . . I failed to come up with a stinging reply, so I whirled around and marched away, confident that I had won another huge moral victory over the cat.

At least I had a bone to show for my efforts. Pete had nothing but a tree.

Holding my trashed face at a proud angle, I marched proudly down to the . . . my goodness, there was Sally May at the yard gate. Acting on instinct, I altered my flight plan and pointed myself toward the gas tanks.

I mean, there is something about Sally May that arouses certain feelings of, well, guilt in a dog. Even when we haven't done anything naughty, her very presence makes us think we have. And in this case, I had more or less been involved in chasing her precious kitty . . .

“Hank, come here.”

Uh-oh. There it was. She had seen everything. She knew everything. She always saw and knew everything. Didn't she ever sleep?

I altered course again and headed for the yard gate, but this time I switched everything over to Looks of Remorse and Mournful Wags. I began re­hearsing my story.

“Sally May, I know what you're thinking. You probably think that I was beating up on your stupid . . . that is, you probably think I was fighting with your cat, and I realize that the, uh, evidence looks pretty damaging, but I think I can explain everything. Honest. No kidding.”

That's as far as I got with my story. I couldn't seem to get past the “I can explain everything” part. I would just have to wing it and hope for the best.

I approached her with a big cowdog smile. She did not return the smile. Instead, her eyes were filled with ice and snow and cold north winds. Yikes, it appeared that I was in deep trouble.

But you'll never guess what she said. I was shocked. Here's what she said, word for word.

“Now, you look at his face, Alfred Leroy. You see what you caused? Poor old Hank was just minding his own business until you drew him into a fight.”

The boy stuck out his lip. “I was only pwaying, Mom.”

“I know you were playing, Alfred, but the point is that someone else paid the price for your fun.”

“Nuh-uh, 'cause Hank and Pete had fun too.”

“Maybe they did, but they paid for it. Hank got scratched up and Pete got chased up a tree. And what about you—you who started the whole thing?”

“Well . . . I got scwatched. See?” He pointed to a tiny scratch on his arm. “And it hoorts weal bad, Mom, no foolin'.”

She shook her head. “I think you need to come inside and stand in the corner for thirty minutes.”

“Aw Mom!”

“And think about being kinder to animals. God didn't put them here for you to torment.”

“Aw Mom!”

“In the house. March!”

The boy twisted his face into an angry pout and beamed a hot glare at me, of all things. “Hank, you got me in twouble and you're a dummy.”

Me? What . . . ?

I stared at him in disbelief as Sally May escorted him into the house. He was calling ME a dummy and accusing ME of getting him into trouble? What a wild imagination he had!

But that didn't matter now, because Sally May had sniffed out the real culprit in the case and was hauling him off to jail. It served him right, the little snipe.

Justice had been . . . although I had to admit, in the deep dark wickedness of my heart, that giving the cat his daily thrashing had been worth all the scratches. If given the opportunity to do it all over again, I would have done it all over again . . . especially if Little Alfred got blamed for it.

Heh heh.

Not a bad deal, in other words, especially when you considered that I had also won the Grand Prize of three juicy, delicious T-bone steak bones, speaking of which . . .

Where were my bones?

I sniffed the ground and located the spots where they had been—three distinking locations that still held the warm and wonderful fragrance of steak juice.

The smell was there. The bones were not.

They were gone.

SOMEONE HAD STOLEN MY STEAK BONES!

I went streaking down to the gas tanks. I had supposed that I would find Drover asleep on his gunnysack bed, but I was shocked to find him awake. But that was only the first of several shocks that awaited me, as you will see.

I came roaring up to the gas tanks, throttled down, hit Full Air Brakes, and came sliding to a stop.

“Drover! I'm glad you're awake.”

He gave me his usual silly grin. “Thanks, Hank. I'm glad too, 'cause the awaker you are, the dayer it seems.”

“What?”

“I said . . . well, let me think here. I said, the awaker the day, the shorter the night. I think that's what I said.”

“Hmmm. Well, that's an interesting way of put­ting it, but what was your point?”

“The point. Well, let's see here.” He rolled his eyes around. I tried to remain patient.

Are you getting impatient? Let's change chapters. Maybe that will help.