The Case of the Secret Weapon. John R. Erickson

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      My search turned up nothing. There was absolutely nobody that I wanted to meet at this particular time and place.

      So what does a guy do in this situation? Run? Attack? Bark? I was in the process of weighing these options when I heard a voice in the darkness. “Oh, hi. What are you doing here?”

      I melted with relief. I mean, you’ve seen what happens to ice cream on a blistering hot day, right? That was me. All the muscles in my highly conditioned body released their tension, and I became a puddle of a doglike substance.

      Can you guess who it was? Drover. I didn’t know whether to be sad, mad, or glad. After a moment of brittle silence, I whispered, “What are you doing here, you little sneak?”

      “Well . . . I couldn’t sleep on that hard floor.”

      “What? That’s ridiculous! Drover, we are the elite troops of the ranch’s Security Division, and we sleep wherever we fall at the end of the day.”

      “Yeah, but I didn’t figure Slim would mind if I borrowed part of his bed. It’s a pretty nice bed.”

      “Of course it’s a nice bed, but it’s not for dogs.”

      “I’ll be derned. What are you doing here?”

      There was a moment of silence. “I was conducting a routine patrol of the promises.”

      “You mean the premises?”

      “What?”

      “You said you promised to parole the premises.”

      “That’s correct, and in the process of doing that, I caught you trespassing on Slim’s bed. Drover, I ought to throw the book at you! Do you have any idea what would happen if Slim woke up and caught us here?”

      “Reckon he’d be mad?”

      “Course he would. At the very least, he’d kick us out of bed. At the worst, he might throw us out of the house. Is that what you want, to become a homeless waif?”

      “Well, I sure like cookies.”

      “What?”

      “I like cookies.”

      “Yes, and so what? Everyone likes cookies.”

      “Well, you said something about vanilla wafers.”

      I took a slow breath of air and searched for patience. “Drover, I said ‘homeless waif,’ not vanilla wafer. A waif is not a cookie.”

      “Yeah, I think about ’em all the time. I even dream about cookies.”

      I stuck my nose in his face. “Stop talking about cookies. The point is that you’re taking up my space on Slim’s bed.”

      “Gosh, you mean . . .”

      “Yes. The Head of Ranch Security needs a good night’s sleep.”

      “Well, there’s plenty of room. Maybe we could share. I promise to be good.”

      I gave that some thought. “I suppose it might work. We’ll curl up at the foot of the bed.”

      I heard him giggle. “Foot of the bed. That’s a funny way to put it.”

      “What’s funny?”

      “Well, how can a bed have a foot if it doesn’t have a leg?”

      “Drover, if a bed has a foot, it must have a leg.”

      “Where is it?”

      “I don’t know. I don’t care. What’s your point?”

      “Well, a table has four legs but no feet. A bed has one foot and no legs. Somehow that doesn’t make sense.”

      “Look, pal, you can either make sense or sleep on the bed. Which will it be?”

      “Well . . . sleep, I guess, but I still say . . .”

      “Hush. Shut your little trap and go to sleep.”

      Whew. At last he shut his trap. I curled up at the foot of the bed and went . . . you know what? I couldn’t sleep—because I couldn’t stop thinking about Drover’s ridiculous question: How can a bed have a foot if it doesn’t have a leg to stand on?

      You see what he does to me? In my deepest heart, I DIDN’T CARE, but I couldn’t slink a wick all nerp and . . . swamping honk the snickle­fritzzzzzzzzz . . .

      Chapter Two: Morning at Slim’s Shack

      Okay, maybe I finally dozed off and managed to bag a few hours’ sleep on Slim’s bed. It was exactly the kind of peaceful sleep every loyal dog dreams about and deserves. But let the record show that I don’t care why a bed has a foot but no legs.

      I awoke sometime after dawn, lifted my head, and glanced around. Fresh morning light poured through the open window, and I heard the gobble of wild turkeys outside, a sure sign of a new day. Turkeys gobble and twitter in the morning when they leave their roost, don’t you see, and then they go trudging off to work, pecking seeds and chasing grasshoppers.

      I opened my jaws, threw a curl into my tongue, and was about to pull in a big yawn of fresh air when I noticed the head and face of a man, right beside me. I looked closer and was able to put a name with the face.

      It was Slim Chance, a friend of mine. In fact, he was the guy who owned the bed.

      I wasn’t surprised to find him in his own bed, but you might have already picked up an interesting clue. I had gone to sleep at his feet but had awakened beside his face. In other words, sometime in the night, the bed had reversed itself, and that was pretty amazing.

      You’d think that I would have noticed. I mean, Slim was a pretty big man and . . .

      Wait. There was another explanation. Sleeping beside the master’s face is the kind of thing a loyal dog sometimes does without thinking about it or even knowing about it. I mean, we care so deeply about our people that we just СКАЧАТЬ