The Curse of the Incredible Priceless Corncob. John R. Erickson

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      Well, by the time we got there, Sally May had already scraped off one portion of scraps, and I don’t need to tell you who was there to snatch them the instant they hit the ground: Mister Cheater, Mister Greediness, Pete the Barncat.

      I went straight to him, figgered I’d check out his scraps to see exactly what he’d got. “Out of the way, cat. We’re taking over this deal and you can run along and play.”

      Pete cut his eyes in my direction, pinned his ears down, and started growling and chewing at the same time. You ever notice how a cat does that? They come out with this peculiar sound, see, something between a yowl and a growl, but they’re so greedy and stingy with food, they don’t even bother to stop chewing.

      That’s what Pete did, and hey, there’s just something about that kind of action that makes my temper jump about twenty degrees. Before I knew it, I was growling back at him.

      And Drover, who was safely behind me and out of the range of Pete’s claws, began jumping up and down. “Git ’im, Hankie, git ’im!”

      I might very well have got him, I mean just by George cleaned house right there while it was fresh on my mind, but Sally May reached across the fence and whacked me on the head with her spoon, sort of surprised me since I’d forgot she was there.

      “You dogs get back and leave Pete alone! I’m going to feed you over here so you won’t fight.”

      Pete rolled his eyes in my direction and gave me a grin. I backed off, but not until I had sniffed out his scraps: two steak bones and several nice long strips of steak fat, which happens to be a favorite of mine.

      I love steak fat.

      Sally May moved down the fence a ways and scraped our portion off the plate. When it hit the ground, I made a dive for it, scooped up a nice big bone, and began putting the old mandibles to work, so to speak.

      That first taste of steak juice and steak fat sent waves of sheer joy rushing through my mouth, across my tongue, into my salvanilla glands, and on out to the end of my tail. I rolled the morsel around in my mouth for a moment and then sank my teeth into it and . . .

      HUH?

      Suddenly my mouth fell open and went blank, and the so-called steak scrap dropped out like a dead bird falling out of a tree. It hit the ground with a plop. I stared at it, sniffed it, checked it out.

      I looked up at Sally May and wagged my tail. There had been some mistake. She had given me a baked potato hull. I gave her my most sincere, most hurtful look and wagged my tail extra hard.

      I mean, I’m a very forgiving dog. I understand about mistakes. It would be no exaggeration to say that I’ve made several of them myself, in the course of a long and glorious career in security work.

      Sure, I understood, and to help Sally May make a fair division of the scraps, I was willing to take a little extra time out of my busy schedule, walk down the fence, and redistribute some of the steak fat that Pete was growling and yowling over.

      And I had every intention of sharing my baked potato hull with him too.

      I started down the fence.

      “HANK! You leave Pete alone. I won’t have you beating up on the cat.”

      What ever gave her the idea that I was going to . . . “Now, you dogs have plenty to eat, and I’m going to stand right here until you eat it all up.”

      I went back to the spot. Okay, if a baked potato hull was the best I could get . . . It was gone. My baked potato hull was gone! Someone or something had . . .

      I looked at Drover. He swallowed something rather large and grinned.

      “You just ate my baked potato hull, you idiot! I turn my back on you for just a minute and bingo! You’re stealing my food. What next, Drover? Where do you go from being a common food thief?”

      “Well . . . I thought you didn’t want it.”

      “Of course I didn’t want it, but it was still mine.”

      “I’m sorry, Hank, but I was hungry and . . . gosh, I feel so bad, I’ll let you have all the rest of it.”

      “Well . . .” I thought it over. “At least you’ve got enough decency to make a gesture, and even though a gesture is only a gesture, it’s no small potatoes either.”

      “No, I got the potatoes. You can have all the rest.”

      “That’s exactly what I intend to do, Drover.”

      I moved into eating position above the scraps. Drover sat down a few feet away and watched me with a cock-eyed smile, while Sally May towered above me and watched with her arms crossed.

      I took a large something into my mouth and began chewing. It was soft on the outside, hard on the inside, and tasted a bit like . . . well, corn. As a matter of fact, it tasted a lot like corn, and the more I chewed it, the cornier it tasted.

      I rolled it around in my mouth and let it fall back to the ground. I stared at it. It was a corncob.

      I lifted my head and searched Sally May’s face for some answers. Had this been an accident? Was it some kind of joke? What did we have here? I wagged my tail and waited for an answer.

      “Well,” she said, “go on and eat it. If you can chew bones, you can chew corncobs. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

      Let me break in here to point СКАЧАТЬ