The Case of the Midnight Rustler (6 page)

Chapter Ten: The Last Crusade

W
ell, I had known all along that the canyon pasture was crawling with coyotes, and here they were, about to crawl all over me.

Actually, I wasn't too worried about it. If they appeared to be in a hostile frame of mind, all I had to do to escape their clutches was trot down the hill and join up with the cattle rustler. It's a wellknown fact that coyotes won't go near a human, whereas a dog . . . well, you get the picture.

Yes, the idea of joining forces with a cow thief raised a few ethical problems, but hungry cannibals have a way of ironing out a lot of ethical problems.

In other words, what faced me now wasn't actually a matter of life and death but a minor inconvenience that might delay my wrapping up the case. With that in mind, I greeted their snarling faces with an air of easy self-confidence.

“Well, by George, look what the cats dragged up!”

“That you, Hunk? Same Hunk-dog we see before many time?”

“I admit it. Yes, I'm the same charming rascal who steals the hearts of the women and can out-sing you fleabags on any given day of any given week.”

“Ha! Same Hunk-dog with big mouth and big stupid in head. Hunk in big trouble now 'cause coyote catch big-mouth stupidhead Hunk out in pasture, ha!”

I chuckled to myself “Hey guys, I hate to tell you this, but I'm not even a little bit scared. Do I look scared?”

They studied me with narrowed eyes. “Not looking scared. Looking stupid, away from house and boom-boom.”

“Yes, but the point is that I don't look scared because I'm not scared, and I'm not scared because I know something you don't know. And because you don't know it, Snort, it follows from simple logic that YOU are scared.”

They got a big laugh out of that. “Hunk talk stupider and stupidest all time! Coyote not scared of nothing. Love to fight and sing rowdy song and beat up whole world, oh boy, and maybe eat Hunk for breakfast too.”

I joined in with their laughter. “Yes, but you're forgetting one small detail, Snort. Know­ledge is power. If I know something you don't know, then I am stronger than you. And if I'm stronger than you, there's nothing you can do to me, right?”

This got their attention. It had taken a while but the truth had finally dripped through the coffeemaker of their minds.

“What Hunk know that coyote not know?”

“Well, if I told you, then you would know and I'd lose my power.”

“Uh. But if Hunk not tell, coyote not believe and maybe eat Hunk anyway.”

Hmmm. I hadn't thought of that. He had a point there.

“Okay, I'll tell you, but you must solemnly swear never to use it against me because, well, that would be cheating. Can you do that?”

“Ha, coyote good for cheating.”

“No, I mean solemnly swearing.”

“Uh. Coyote not so good for sommenly swear.”

“But you must solemnly swear or I won't tell you. You have to take the whole deal or nothing at all.”

They went into a huddle and whispered back and forth. Then Snort broke the circle and said, “Coyote have big conference, decide to take sommenly swear with whole deal.”

“All right, raise your left paws.”

Snort shook his head. “Not pause. Go right into whole deal with sommenly swear.”

“No, no, you missed my point!”

“Not point at coyote. Coyote not like pointing-at-to-be.”

I took a deep breath and studied the stars over­head. “Snort, let's back up and start over.”

“Coyote not back up from nothing. Fight badger and bobcat, beat up skunk, play catch with rattlesnake, oh boy. Not back up from Hunk too.”

“Okay, okay. Both of you, raise your left front foot.” This threw them into confusion as they lifted first one foot and then the other.

“Got two front foots left.”

“Yes, but only one left front foot. You see, all of us have a left foot and a right foot. To solemnly swear something, you're supposed to raise your right front paw. But I know you guys don't know left from right or right from wrong, so I told you to raise the left one—which is wrong—knowing that you would raise the wrong one instead, which of course is the right one.”

Their small greenish eyes stared at me. “Right foot wrong?”

“No, the right foot is right, but I knew you'd make the wrong choice, so that would make the left foot right.”

“Right foot left?”

“If you raised your right foot, your left foot would be left on the ground, that's right.”

Snort clubbed me over the head with his right foot. “Hunk shut stupid mouth about foot and get on with sommenly swear.”

“Okay, fine, sorry I mentioned it. Repeat after me: I, Snort the Coyote, do solemnly swear for myself and for my brother Rip, who never seems to talk, that we will not use Hank's secret information against him.”

Four empty yellow eyes stared at me. “Too much for remember.”

“Okay, just say, ‘We do.'”

“You do.”

“Not ‘you do,' you dodo. WE DO.”

He clubbed me over the head again. “Not call coyote a weed-dew!”

“I didn't call you a weed-dew. I called you a dodo.”

“Uh. Dodo better than weed-dew. Coyote not like weed, and dew make everybody wet. Coyote not like wet.”

“Great. Do we have a deal or not?”

“Uh. Got deal, good deal.”

“In other words, you both solemnly swear?”

They nodded their heads. “Both sommenly swear.”

Whew! Boy, I wasn't sure I'd ever get them sworn in. Our system of laws and orders sure wasn't designed for cannibals.

“Now Hunk tell secret knowledge, and pretty quick too.”

“All right, here's the deal.” Smiling to myself, I brought my mouth closer to their ears and whispered, “I know that you guys can't do any damage to me, because there's a man on the other side of this hill, see, and all I have to do is . . .”

The sneaking, scheming, counterfeit, two-timing, double-crossing, two-faced, cheating . . . you know what they did? In an instant, and I mean in the blink of an eye, they broke their solemn oaths, used my secret information against me, swapped ends, and placed their hulking bodies between me and my escape route.

I couldn't believe my own eyes. I was stunned. Shocked. Dismayed. Crushed. Disillusioned.

Also mad at myself for being stupid enough to trust them, what a dumb trick, how could I have been so brick-headed!

And now, blocking my escape route, they greeted me with huge fangs and glittering eyes. “Hey, you can't do this. You promised, you swore a solemn oath!”

“Ha! Coyote not give a hoot for sommenly oath. Coyote berry good to cheat, too bad for Hunk.”

“Yes, but you probably didn't realize that once you've committed yourself to cheating, everybody in the world will call you a CHEATER. Is that how you want to live your life, Snort, with everybody in the whole world pointing at you and saying, ‘Oh look at him, he's nothing but a cheater?'”

“Coyote not give a hoot for whole world pointing. Coyote not give a hoot for nothing but eat.”

“Well, uh, gulp, maybe what you should do right now is, uh, sing your famous song about not giving a hoot. Wouldn't that be fun?”

They shook their heads. “Not fun. Only want eat Hunk for supper, oh boy.”

Oh boy indeed. I couldn't even interest them in singing. That was a real bad sign. Another bad sign was that they began creeping toward me, grinning at me with wild crazy grins and licking their respective chops.

“No, wait, maybe we could . . . hey, I've got a great idea. Maybe instead of eating, we could . . .” They kept coming. “Weenies, that's what you guys need—a whole package of juicy weenies, where could we find some . . . don't look at me that way, Snort, it makes me . . .”

Nothing was working this time. I had talked my way out of this same situation several times in the past, but now . . . holy smokes, they kept creeping toward me! If I ran, they would follow me out into darkness of the pasture, but if I didn't run . . .

Fellers, all at once things were looking pretty bleak. There I was, a poor helpless ranch dog, standing in the middle of a big pasture, in the middle of the night and surrounded by hungry ferocious coyotes who had lied and cheated and tricked me and used my own natural honesty against me.

I would really hate to end it all right here, and I mean not only the story but also my entire career, but things had sure 'nuff gotten out of control for me and . . .

Anyways, they ate me and that's all the story.

Sorry to disappoint you.

Good-bye.

Chapter Eleven: Okay, Maybe I Exaggerated, but Not Much

I
already told you that I was eaten alive by cannibals, so how come you kept on reading?

Maybe you just couldn't bring yourself to accept the awful truth. Maybe you couldn't bear the thought of facing life without a Head of Ranch Security.

Or maybe—this one is a very remote possibility but I'll mention it anyway—maybe you had a sneaking suspicion that I might have stretched the truth just a tad, and that maybe the cannibals didn't eat me after all. Or at least not all of me.

In other words, maybe they left just enough of me to continue the story.

Well, shame on you for having such thoughts, but that's kind of what happened, actually. They didn't get me entirely eaten, see, and left just exactly enough of me to keep the story going. But it was nip and tuck all the way, a very close call. Here's what happened.

They had jumped me and had me pinned to the ground and things were looking just about as bleak as things can look, when all at once, who or whom do you suppose came blundering into the picture?

Not Slim. No, not Uncle Johnny. He was probably asleep in his pickup. No, not the cattle rustler.

Missy Coyote? Nope.

You're not doing so well. Guess again. Not Loper.

Wallace and Junior? Not even close.

You give up? I knew you'd never guess. Okay, here's the answer: Brewster. Yes, good old sleepy­eyed Brewster. You'd completely forgotten about him, hadn't you?

Well, here he came, trotting up to the scene of the riot in that long bouncing stride of his, and with a big friendly grin all over his mouth.

“Oh, here you are. Gosh, I must have fallen asleep and when I woke up, you were gone, but here you are, I reckon.”

Yes, there I was—on my back on the ground, being mauled and slobbered on by starving cannibals. Old Brew lumbered up to us and the first thing that happened was that he stepped right in the middle of Snort's face.

“Oops, 'scuse me.”

Then he shifted his position to avoid Snort, and mashed Rip's nose three inches into the ground.

“Oops, sorry about that.”

You know, there's one thing you never want to do to a cannibal: step on his face. Brew had just done it twice, and with the biggest feet of any dog I'd ever seen before, I mean they were huge feet, and suddenly we had us two inflamed coyote brothers snarling at Brewster.

Well, let's put it this way. First they snarled, then their eyes bugged out of their heads when they began to realize how big he was.

He gave them his big sloppy grin. “How y'all tonight?”

He should have guessed that they weren't so good. I mean, not only were their eyes blazing with yellow fire but Rip had a dirt pile on the end of his nose where it had been buried in the ground, and Snort's left eye was beginning to swell shut.

“Not step on coyote face, big dummy!”

Brew seemed shocked. He turned to me (I was scraping myself off the ground), he turned to me and said, “Who are those boys talking to?”

In the process of turning, he also began to wag his tail. Have we discussed Brewster's tail? That thing was as big around as a tree limb, and fellers when he turned and wagged at the same time, that tail caught both coyote brothers right on the point of the chin and DECKED 'EM. I mean, lifted 'em off the ground and flipped 'em over backward.

If I'd started a right uppercut over in the next pasture and swung it with everything I had, it wouldn't have done half as much damage as what Brew had just done by accident.

That guy was dangerous, and the scary part was that he didn't even know it! He was still looking around with that puzzled grin on his face when Rip and Snort climbed off the floor.

“Have you caught the rustlers yet?”

“Uh no, not yet, Brew. I ran into a little snag.”

“Aw heck. What happened?”

The brothers shook the stars and checkers out of their heads and prepared for action. I saw what was coming. “Brew, what snagged me is fixing to snag you. Check out your right flank.”

Brew swung his head around just as Rip made a dive for him. Their heads collided in midair—CLUNK!—and Rip was bedded down for the rest of the evening. He hit the ground and didn't move a hair.

“Oops, 'scuse me there, sorry.”

That made it one down and one to go, and the one to go looked madder than a den of bumblebees. He opened his coyote jaws to the fully open position (a pretty scary sight, in case you've never seen it), sprang through the air, and lit right in the middle of Brewster's back.

He delivered enough of a blow to cause Brewster to grunt and look around. “Hey, fella, take it easy, I've got a bad back.” And just as though he were shooing a fly away, he threw an elbow that landed under Snort's chin and knocked him tail-over-teakettle out into the pasture.

Brew turned back to me and sniffed his nose. “Who are those guys? I never saw 'em before.”

I dragged myself off the ground. “Just a couple of junior thugs who thought they were pretty tough until they tangled with you. And me, of course. We make a pretty awesome team, Brew.”

“Thanks, Hank.”

“I could have whipped 'em but it would have taken me a lot longer if you hadn't come along. You . . . that is, WE sure cleaned house on those guys.”

“You mean . . . that was a fight?”

“Oh, just a little altercation, nothing to write home about.”

“I don't much go in for fightin'.”

“Yeah, well, the way you operate, you probably don't get a whole lot of practice.”

“No sir, I don't believe in violence. Heck, if you can't work things out by talking, you ought to just walk away from it, is how I've always looked at it.”

“Right.”

I crept to the top of the hill and studied the situation down below. The rustler had finished closing in the corral with the portable panels and had made himself a little chute that led into the trailer. He was inside the pen with five or six cow-calf pairs, trying to get the calves to load.

It appeared that he wasn't having much luck, which meant that we might have enough time to run back to camp and alert Slim to what was going on. That was kind of important to solving the case, don't you see, because only Slim could write down the description of the vehicle and the license number.

I do many things well, but writing down license numbers isn't one of them.

“Well, Brew, our next assignment is to highball it back to camp and get Slim out of bed.”

His ears jumped and his eyes grew wide. “Did you say ‘highball it back to camp?'”

“That's correct, at top speed.”

He plunked his big bohunkus down on the ground. “You know, Hank, I've never been too keen on highballing it back to anywhere, and if it's all the same to you, I think I'll stick around here and try to keep this hill from blowing away. And I might even,” he yawned, “take me a little nap.”

“What'll you do when Rip and Snort wake up?”

“Who? Oh, them? Shucks, they seemed like pretty nice fellers to me, just a little clumsy, is all. I don't think we'll have any trouble.”

I glanced at the sleeping cannibals. Brewster would probably never realize that he had just thrashed two of the toughest coyotes in Ochiltree County, and I didn't see any point in trying to explain it to him. But I couldn't help wondering how much damage the guy could do if he ever tried.

“All right, you stay here and keep your eye on that rustler, and I'll make a lightning dash back to camp.”

“Good deal. You handle the lightning dashes, and I'll sure keep my eyes on the rustler—if I can keep 'em open that long, is where the problem's going to come.” He yawned again. “Boy, you guard dogs don't wrinkle the sheets much at night, do you?”

“Just part of the job, Brewster.”

“Yep, and I'm sure glad it's your job and not mine.” He crossed his paws in front of him and laid his chin on the crossed paws. “Holler when you need me, otherwise I'll zzzzzzzzzz.”

It sure didn't take him long to fall asleep. He may very well have been the sleepingest dog I'd ever run across.

Well, maybe Brewster had time to take a nap but I sure didn't. I pointed myself toward the north­east, hit Code Three, and went streaking up the canyon.

I won't go into details about my emergency run back to camp—how I leaped over rocks and fallen trees, climbed mountains and swam swollen rivers, ran through brambles and sticker weeds and thissy thornals . . . thorny thistles, that is; whipped twenty-two head of hungry coyotes, two badgers, and three porcupines.

I won't mention any of that, or how I arrived back at camp, exhausted, spent, completely used up, battered, on my last leg, near death, but triumphant through it all.

I'll say only that I made it back to camp, staggered up to the tent flap, and began barking the alarm.

“Hank, shut up!”

He didn't understand. This wasn't just ordinary late-night barking, but rather a Code Three situation that demanded his immediate attention, so I turned up the volume and barked harder and louder than . . .

SPLAT!

Was he trying to be funny? Throwing pillows at the Head of Ranch Security in the middle of the night? What kind of outfit was this, anyway?

Hey, we didn't have a minute to spare! That rustler was down there loading cattle, and if I didn't get Slim out of bed pretty quick . . .

I had to do something to wake him up, and do it fast. I did.