Moonlight Madness. John R. Erickson

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СКАЧАТЬ get rid of a fly by snatching him out of the air and biting down on him, but if you use that same tactic on a wasp, he will sometimes sting you on the lips or tongue.

      Both are flying insects and you’d think that the same procedure would work as well for one as for the other. That’s not the case, and . . .

      Anyways, I waited patiently at the gate. I was counting the throbs in my wounded tongue when, at last, the back door opened and the cowboys came out, rubbing their bellies and growling with satisfaction.

      At the gate, they paused to make their plans for the afternoon’s work. Loper would stay at headquarters and do some welding in the machine shed while Slim checked windmills and put out salt blocks.

      Welding didn’t interest me at all, and hanging around the machine shed, a guy could get himself involved with wasps. I never mess around with wasps. Hence, I followed Slim down to the china­berry grove, where he had parked the flatbed pickup in the shade.

      I would help him check windmills and put out salt. Or so I thought. I never dreamed that we would get ourselves involved in . . . well, you’ll see.

      We pulled around to the cake house and loaded ten blocks of salt onto the pickup bed. Then we headed east on the Wolf Creek road. I noticed that Slim was getting drowsy in the heat. His eyelids were drooping. I barked and that woke him up, but then he glared at me and muttered, “Don’t bark in the cab or I’ll throw you out of here.”

      Well, ex-cuse me! All I’d done was kept him from falling asleep at the wheel and saved us from being smashed and killed in a terrible accident, is all I’d done. But did I get any credit for saving our lives? Oh no.

      Once I’d barked him awake, he started singing to keep himself awake. It almost made me regret . . . no, listening to him sing was better than getting smushed in a wreck. Here’s how it went.

      The Cowboy’s Transfusion

      There was an old cowboy who lived all alone in a shack in a state of confusion.

      He felt pretty bad and went to the doc who gave him a total transfusion.

      He laid on the table and thought of his woes, till the bottle of blood came up empty.

      Then he leaped to the floor and yelled to the doc, “I feel like I’m eighteen or twenty!”

      When he went to the desk to pay for this deal, he decided to double the fee.

      He wrote ’em a check for three hundred bucks. “A heck of a bargain,” said he.

      And back at the ranch he flew into work like a demon possessed with ambition,

      Built ten miles of fence, hauled nine loads of hay, and bucked all his broncs to submission.

      He did all his work and then he got bored, he couldn’t seem to relax.

      When he tried to sit down, he just couldn’t do it because of those energy attacks.

      So he went back to town, got a ticket for speedin’ and ran his old truck through a rail.

      By sundown he’d got in three fights in a bar and the police had took him to jail.

      So he called up the doctor who’d cured his old age and got him in such of a mess.

      He asked ’bout that stuff they’d put in his bod, and then the doctor confessed.

      “There’s been a mistake, you got diesel, not blood. No wonder it’s turned to a wreck.

      We’ll make you a deal and give your blood back . . . just as soon as you fix that hot check!”

      Hmmm. Well, that was okay, I guessed, if it kept Slim awake and kept me from being smeared all over the dash. But as for it being a great musical experience . . . it wasn’t.

      Well, we were toodling along the Wolf Creek road when all of a sudden . . . holy smokes, the screech of brakes, and I went flying into the dash and almost into the ashtray which was full of stale cigar butts.

      We slid to a stop in the middle of the road. Slim looked out his window at . . . something. I picked myself up off the floorboard and heard him say, “Huh. There’s a dead coon. Looks like she got run over in the night.”

      I rushed to the window to see for myself, which required that I, well, stand in his lap. Sure enough, there was the . . .

      He pushed me away. “Hank, have I told you lately that you stink?”

      Well, yes, as a matter of fact. We had discussed that hateful rumor on several occasions and had decided that there was no truth to it whatsoever. None. Just a pack of vicious lies.

      And Slim didn’t smell so great himself, and people who live in grass huts shouldn’t throw stones.

      Strike matches.

      There’s something they shouldn’t do, and therefore they shouldn’t do it.

      If he didn’t want me to stand in his lap, why didn’t he just come out and say so? He didn’t need to hurl lies and insults at me.

      Dogs have feelings too.

      We were about to drive away from the scene, when all at once we heard barking. I heard it. Slim heard it. But I heard it first. We looked off to the north, toward a grove of chinaberry trees on the west side of the creek.

      Two dogs stood at the base of the tree. Three dogs. And they were looking up into the tree and barking at something. Four dogs, actually, my goodness, a whole pack of dogs, and I knew at once that they were not local ranch dogs.

      The dogs in our neighborhood don’t run in packs. We ranch dogs know better. Packs of dogs almost always get into big trouble, and we’re talking about killing chickens and sheep and chasing cattle around the pasture.

      Hence, from the evidence at hand plus simple logic, I had concluded that these must be stray dogs from town. Pretty impressive, huh? You bet it was, and I even had a pretty good idea who these guys were, which is almost unbelievable that I could come up with such a huge amount of information in just a matter of minutes. Seconds, actually.

      Microseconds.

      Incredibly fast.

      So who were they? You’ll never guess. Don’t even try unless you’re hooked into Data Control, as I am. Just relax and let me handle the hard stuff.

      Do you remember Buster and Muggs and their gang of town thugs? Well, maybe you remember them but you never would have guessed that they were the very ones who were barking at something up in that chinaberry tree.

      Yes, they were back on the ranch and that meant nothing but trouble. I had gone into combat against those guys on several occasions and had given them the thrashing they so richly . . .

      Huh? Slim had opened his door?

      “Go git ’em, Hankie, run ’em off the ranch!”

      I, uh, went into Slow Wags on the tail section and gave him one of our standard looks which said, “Solly, me not spicka you longweech.” Which was true, or partly true.

      He СКАЧАТЬ