Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. John R. Erickson
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Название: Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
Автор: John R. Erickson
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Учебная литература
Серия: Hank the Cowdog
isbn: 9781591887065
isbn:
“Doesn’t it have to be one or the other?”
“Yes and no.”
“Oh, okay.”
“In most instances, a simple yes or no will do, but in this particular case the answer is more complicated, for you see, Drover, we have stumbled into a garden.”
“Isn’t that what I said a while ago?”
“You were close, very close considering your limited, uh, gifts. You did in fact suggest that we had stumbled into the garden by mistake.”
“I thought that’s what I said.”
“But what you didn’t take into account, Drover, was that the entire garden had been moved fifteen degrees to the south!”
“No fooling?”
“Yes. We have walked into a trap.”
“Oh.”
“The purpose of which was to keep us from sounding the alarm. But what they didn’t take into account was our superior barking ability.”
“You mean . . .”
“Exactly. We may be cut off from the house, Drover, but we can still sound the alarm. On the count of three, we’ll commence barking. One! And I want you to put your heart and soul into it. Two! Just by George bark as you’ve never barked in all your life. Three!”
“Now?”
“Let ’er rip!”
Fellers, we leaned into the task and did some heavy-duty barking. Drover did his usual “yip-yip-yip, pause, yip-yip-yip, pause, yip-yip-yip, etc.” And on each yip, all four of his feet left the ground. Funny how he does that.
I added my deep masculine roar, the same brand of barking that has struck terror in the hearts of monsters, coyotes, coons, badgers, skunks, rattlesnakes, and cats—not to mention cattle, which are my specialty.
Loper wasn’t what you would call swift in responding to our call. It took us a good fifteen minutes of solid barking to get a light on in the house. At last we heard his voice:
“SHUT UP, YOU IDIOTS!!”
We kept it up, just barked our hearts out. Suddenly we saw a flash of light, followed by a boom and a sprinkling of buckshot in the trees.
Drover stopped barking. “Is he shooting at us?”
I gave him a withering glare. “How dumb do you think he is? He must have seen one of the fiends. Keep barking and maybe we can get him down here.”
We sent up another salvo of high explosive barking. Before long, I saw the beam of a flashlight and heard the yard gate slam. At last we were getting somewhere.
“Keep it up, Drover. We want to give him our coordinates. Otherwise, he’ll never hear us with all this thunder.”
We kept up a steady barrage. The flashlight came closer, then pieces of Loper began to take shape in the darkness: cowboy boots, skinny white legs, striped boxer shorts, white belly, hairy chest, angry face, cowboy hat, shotgun.
He hadn’t bothered to dress up, but that was okay. What mattered was that he was there with his gun.
He leaned on the fence and threw his light around the garden. It revealed a, shall we say, dismal scene of tomato plants, radishes, lettuce, turnips, and other young vegetables tromped flat on the ground by unknown forces.
Then I heard Loper’s voice. “Holy smokes, my wife is gonna kill somebody! The coons must have . . .”
The light hit me, punched me right in the retinas, kind of hurt. I squinted but held my head up high and gave my tail such a big sweeping wag that I got a piece of tomato plant caught in them long hairs out near the end, had to reach back and pull it off with my teeth.
It was still hanging from my mouth when I heard Loper say, “Oh no, I don’t believe this. Hank, you idiot, you nincompoop, you moron!”
HUH? I glanced at Drover. He had disappeared.
“You pea-brained, manure-headed, sewer-dipping, ignert, garden-destroying, barking-all-night, sorry excuse for a cowdog, GET YOUR TAIL OUT OF SALLY MAY’S GARDEN!!!!”
What . . . how . . . but I . . . now hold on . . .
I heard him pump a shell into the chamber and figgered the time had come for me to sell out, never mind the explanations. I made a dive out of the flashlight beam and took aim for the feed barn.
Just then the rain hit, and I’m talking about hard rain, fellers, big drops and plenty of them, buckets of water, raining down snakes and weasels and pitchforks. I made it to the feed barn just in time, slithered through that place at the bottom where the door’s warped, and crawled inside.
In other words, I escaped serious wetting by a matter of seconds.
That’s the good part of the story. The unfortunate part is that Loper and his shotgun, shall we say, didn’t escape serious wetting.
They got drenched, soaked. But that wasn’t my fault.
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