The Case of the One-Eyed Killer Stud Horse. John R. Erickson

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СКАЧАТЬ went streaking up the hill, with me in the lead and Drover bringing up the rear. When we got to the yard gate, I glanced around and saw that we had succeeded in our first objective.

      Sally May and Loper were there talking, but Pete was nowhere in sight. Ha ha, ho ho! In her right hand, Sally May held a plate, in her left a wooden spoon.

      I turned to my assistant and gave him a worldly smile. “This is going to be a piece of cake, Drover.”

      “Oh boy! Usually it’s burned toast and a busted egg.”

      “What?”

      “I said, usually it’s burned toast . . .”

      “I heard that, Drover, but it shows that you misunderstood what I said.”

      “Oh.”

      “‘Piece of cake’ is an expression, a figure of speech. It means, ‘This is going to be easy.’”

      “Oh. Well, that’s easy enough.”

      “Exactly. You see, Drover, sometimes our words have subtle meanings that go beyond the actual words. That’s the beauty of language, its many shades of meaning.”

      “Yeah, and on a hot day that shade sure comes in handy.”

      “Exactly. So there you are, son, a little lesson in the endless variety of language.”

      “It’s pretty good, all right. Sure hope it’s chocolate.”

      “What?”

      “I’ve never had chocolate cake in the morning.”

      For a moment I considered giving the runt a tongue lashing, but just then Loper spoke up.

      “Hon, I’m going over to check that fence be­tween us and Billy’s west pasture. His stud horse got through the fence yesterday and I found him in the home pasture. I don’t want that crazy thing coming up around the house. He could hurt someone.”

      “Oh my!”

      “He’s got a mean streak and only one eye. I wouldn’t want to take any chances with you or Little Alfred. He’s kind of dangerous.”

      Loper turned his eyes on me. I gave him a big smile and wagged my tail and went over and jumped up on him. Licked him on the hand too. I wanted to build up a few Loyal Dog Points, see. In this line of work, a guy needs to get points in the bank any time he can.

      Anyways, I jumped up on Loper, said howdy, wished him good morning, and, you know, let him know that I was there on the job. He looked down into my face, curled his lip, and pushed me away.

      “Get down! You stink.”

      HUH? Well, I . . .

      “If we had a dog on this ranch that was worth anything,” he wiped his hand on his jeans, “we wouldn’t have to worry about Billy’s stud horse. Anyway, when the cousins get here, don’t let them play in the pasture.”

      “All right. They’ll be here around eleven. Will you be home for lunch?”

      “I don’t know. I’ve got to help the neighbors move some cattle around. I might be late getting home.”

      While they were talking, Sally May held the plate about waist-high. I got kind of curious as to what tasty morsels might be on it, so I hopped up on my back legs and took a peek.

      Hmmm. Scrambled eggs, five or six fatty ends of bacon, and two pieces of burned toast. Burned toast must have been one of Sally May’s specialties, because she seemed to crank out two or three pieces of it every morning.

      I’m not too crazy about burned toast, but fatty ends of bacon . . . I can get worked up over fatty ends of bacon.

      Sally May had got herself caught up in a conversation and had forgotten to scrape our goodies out on the ground, is what had happened, and it suddenly occurred to me that that plate was probably getting pretty heavy.

      I mean, you don’t think about fatty ends of bacon weighing very much, but you take enough of them and put them together and you’ll come up with a whole entire hog that might weigh, oh, three-four hundred pounds. (That’s where bacon comes from, don’t you know. Hogs. Big hogs.)

      Now, Sally May was a tough old gal but she had her limits. I’d seen her bucking bales of alfalfa on the hay wagon and I’d seen her carrying sacks of chicken feed from her car into the machine shed, but I’d never seen her lift a three hundred pound hog. Even Loper couldn’t do that.

      She had no business lifting hogs. I mean, here was the mother of a small child. Didn’t she have enough to do, keeping up the house and the garden and the chickens, caring for a child and a husband? Seemed to me it was my duty to lighten her load a little bit.

      I’ve always figgered that one of the reasons we’re put here on this earth is to help others. That’s why, when I have a chance to ease someone else’s burden, I try to do it.

      And let me tell you, it wasn’t an easy thing to do. I mean, there I was standing on my back legs, and I had to turn my head to the side, ease my nose over the edge of the plate, and snag the bacon ends with my tongue.

      You ever try to snag something with your tongue, when your head’s turned sideways? It sounds easy, but you can take my word for it, it ain’t. I’m not sure why. A guy’s tongue ought to work just as well sideways as up and down. I mean, why should a tongue care which way is up and which is down?

      Beats me, but the point is that it was a difficult maneuver. No ordinary dog would have even attempted it. I not only attempted it but came that close to pulling it off. Here’s how I did it. (You might want to jot down a few notes.)

      First, I extended my tongue to its fully ex­tended position, at which point I had something like six inches of powerful tongue reeled out of my mouth. Second, I concentrated all my powers of concentration on putting a curl into the end of it.

      Pretty tough.

      Thirdly, with the same curl in the end of the same tongue we have been discussing, I began easing a bacon end over toward the edge of the plate, even though the root of my tongue was getting tired from the strain of being fully extended. (Try it and see if the root of your tongue doesn’t get tired.)

      Fourthly, just as I was about to throw a coil of tongue around the juicy end of bacon fat, reel it back into my mouth, and gobble it down, Sally May saw what I was doing and smacked me on the nose with the wooden spoon.

      “Get down, Hank! I’ll feed you when Pete gets here.”

      In other words, she had misinterpreted my intentions. Maybe she thought I was merely trying to steal the bacon before her stupid and greedy cat arrived to hog it all. Not a bad idea, actually, but of course I had higher motives.

      On this outfit, it seems to be all right for a cat to be a hog, but let a dog try to be a hog just once and WHACK! He gets it across the nose with a wooden spoon.

      It ain’t fair, but let’s don’t get started СКАЧАТЬ