The Case of the Monkey Burglar. John R. Erickson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a woman needs.”

      Slim: “Heh. How did that go over?”

      Loper: “Like a snake in the bathtub.”

      They stepped out of the machine shed, and I could see that Slim was trying to bite back a smile. “Loper, I think you got it backwards. Any woman who’d stay married to you deserves a trip to the mountains. And a million bucks.”

      Loper gave him a sour look. “What do you know about women? The last time I checked, you were still a bachelor, and I haven’t noticed any ladies lined up at your gate, trying to get in.”

      “They come during work hours when you’re taking a nap.”

      “I mean, your life is so simple, it’s pathetic. The only difference between you and a grasshopper is that you wear socks.”

      “I can sing too. That’s a big difference.”

      “I’ve heard you sing. Even the dogs can’t stand it.”

      Slim pulled a toothpick out of his hatband and slid it through his teeth. “Loper, just think of all the fun things you can do on vacation. Why, you can take Alfred fishing.”

      “That’s fun? I’d rather clean out the septic tank.”

      “Well, go see a movie.”

      Loper rolled his eyes. “Do you know what it costs to take a family to a movie? A fortune, and they charge two bucks for a dinky little sack of popcorn.”

      “Take some sunflower seeds.”

      “I don’t like sunflower seeds.”

      “Then take the kids to one of them water parks.”

      Loper glared at him. “Water! Do I need to drive three hundred miles to play in the water? We’ve got stock tanks all over this ranch, and two miles of creek.”

      Slim shook his head. “Loper, you make a mule look reasonable. You do all this bellyaching, and what’s the point? Tomorrow morning, you’ll load up the car and drive to the mountains. You might as well be brave and have some fun.”

      Loper grunted. “I’ll be brave, I’ll load the car, I’ll drive halfway across the country, and when I get there, I won’t have fun.”

      “All right, don’t have fun. Go to the mountains and pout for three days.”

      “I will.”

      “Good. I hope you’re miserable, but I won’t be.” Slim flashed a smile. “When I get you off the place, I’m going to have a blast.”

      “Oh, yeah?”

      “That’s right. It’ll be like three days without a rotten tooth.”

      “You really think so?”

      Slim hitched up his jeans. “Yes sir, I know so.”

      Loper gazed off into the distance and was quiet for a moment. “You know, we’ve got eight hundred bales of hay in the alfalfa field.”

      Slim blinked. “Yeah, but...”

      “I just had a great idea.” Loper slid his gaze back to Slim. “While I’m gone, maybe you’d like to haul some hay.”

      Slim’s Adam’s apple jumped. “By myself?”

      “You can take the dogs.”

      “Now, Loper . . .”

      Loper flashed a grin. “See, that’s one thing about bosses, Slim. We don’t want the hired hands to be happy when we’re gone.”

      “This ain’t funny.”

      Loper let out a big laugh. “Sure it is. It’s hilarious. While I’m miserable having fun, you’ll be miserable hauling hay. It’ll help ease my pain.” Loper walked over to him and whispered, “Never let the boss know you’re glad to see him go. It’ll come back and bite you every time.”

      Chuckling to himself, Loper walked down to the house. Slim glared after him for a long time, then turned to me. “Me and my big mouth.”

      Right, and I could have told him, but do these guys ever listen to their dogs? No, and that’s why we try to keep our opinions to ourselves.

      The next morning around nine o’clock, Loper loaded Sally May and the children into the family car, and off they went to the mountains. I led them all the way up to the mailbox on the county road and sent them on their way with Barks of Farewell. That done, I made my way back to headquarters and went looking for Slim.

      I had a feeling this was going to be a hard day, and he would need all the support we dogs could provide. I mean, he’d been tagged with a pretty tough assignment—hauling eight hundred bales of alfalfa hay all by himself.

      On any ranch with modern equipment, that wouldn’t have been such a difficult job, but our outfit did everything The Cowboy Way. That means we shunned all laborsaving devices and relied entirely on junk machinery.

      See, we had only thirty acres of irrigated alfalfa, and that wasn’t quite enough to justify the expense of good equipment. Loper bought all our machinery at farm auctions, and took considerable pride in getting what he called “good deals.”

      Ha. Those guys spent half their summers reading repair manuals, running to town for parts, turning wrenches, and screaming at gutted hay balers and swathers, whose parts lay scattered all over the floor of the machine shed.

      But every now and then the machinery held together long enough to put up some of the hay into bales, and at that point they had to be hauled out of the field and unloaded in the “stack lot,” an area that had been fenced off so that the cattle wouldn’t plunder the hay and scatter it over half the ranch.

      Under ordinary conditions, our hay-hauling involved the use of an old flatbed truck and three people: Sally May to drive the truck through the field; Slim to pitch the bales up on the truck; and Loper to stack the hay on the back of the truck.

      Do you see what Slim had done with his big mouth? He would have to do all three of those jobs by himself. I felt some pity for poor Slim. I mean, slaving in a hay field in the heat of summer wasn’t something I would wish on a friend, or even an enemy. On the other hand, he had walked into it with his mouth wide open and . . . well, what can you say?

      Some people never learn, or if they learn, it has to be in the hardest possible way. Slim seemed to be one of those people. Now, if he had consulted his dogs, if he had listened to my advice . . . oh, well. We’ve already touched on that, and there’s no more to be said.

      The worst part of it was that we dogs would have to listen to him moan and gripe for three long days. It would a tough assignment for those of us in the Security Division, as we shared Slim’s pain and eased him through this difficult period in his life. Drover and I would have our hands cut out for us.

      When I returned to the yard gate, Slim wasn’t there, but I found Drover making idle conversation with the cat. Pete.

      When he saw СКАЧАТЬ