The Case of the Buried Deer. John R. Erickson

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Oh, and by the way, Drover managed to slither outside without getting kicked. I don’t know how he always…oh well.

      I sat down on the edge of the porch, as far away from Mister Grump as I could get. I turned my back on him too. He didn’t deserve the companionship of a dog, and I wasn’t sure we would ever be friends again.

      The rain made a steady sizzle on the tin roof, and my goodness, the air smelled wonderful—fresh, damp, heavy with the aroma of sagebrush and old leaves and new grass that was trying to green up. During a drought, we forget how good the world can smell when it gets a drink.

      We sat on the porch for a while, listening to the soft rain and breathing in the delicious air and watching daylight creep over the eastern sky. Drover was sitting nearby, and I noticed that he wore a silly grin on his mouth.

      “What are you grinning about?”

      “Me? Oh, nothing much.”

      “I’m sure that’s true, but when someone grins on this ranch, I need to know what’s going on.”

      “Well, I had a crazy dream.”

      “Oh? Then we needn’t waste any more time. I’m not interested in your dreams.”

      “Thanks. I dreamed I was a famous astronaut, flying through space in a saddle-up.”

      “In a saddle-up?”

      “Yeah, one of those things they launch into space.”

      I heaved a sigh. “Drover, get it right. If you were flying through space, it was in a satellite, which has nothing to do with a saddle.”

      “They sound the same.”

      “They’re not the same.”

      “Well, mine had a saddle.”

      “Okay, your satellite had a saddle, and I have no interest in hearing the rest of your dream.”

      He gave me a sly grin. “I haven’t gotten to the good part. I robbed a train.”

      “You robbed a train? In outer space?”

      “Yeah, it was a whole train-load of bananas!”

      I stared into the vast emptiness of his gaze. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this. In the first place, it’s ridiculous. If someone were listening to this conversation, he’d think we’re just a couple of goofballs. In the second place, that wasn’t your dream, it was MINE!”

      “Gosh, you mean…”

      “Stop butting into my dreams! Find your own.”

      “Hee hee hee.”

      “And don’t giggle in the miggle of my lecture!”

      “If that was your dream, you were asleep! Hee hee. I caught you!”

      Huh?

      I paced to the edge of the porch and gazed off into the distance. Many thoughts tramped across the parade ground of my mind. “Drover, in your own sneaking, slithering way, you’ve exposed a shameful truth about the Security Division. We both slept when we should have been guarding the house. Let’s try to put it behind us. Agreed?”

      “Okay, but what about my Chicken Marks?”

      I marched back to him and laid a paw upon his shoulder. “I’ll handle that. Nobody will ever know. Now, let’s shape up and try to do better.”

      Pretty touching, huh? You bet. Our human friends have no idea how hard we strive to be good dogs. Sometimes we fail, but we’re never content with failure. We just have to pick ourselves up and march onward, knowing that…well, if we mess up again, we won’t tell anyone.

      The somber mood of this occasion was suddenly shattered by Slim’s voice. “The dadgum rain quit!”

      I had been so distracted by departmental business, I hadn’t noticed this crucial detail. I lifted Earatory Scanners and sure enough, our instruments confirmed that the rain had stopped.

      A shiver passed through my biver…through my body, let us say. Why the shiver? Because I knew that Slim would be mad or half-mad for the rest of the day, and the job of cheering him up would fall squarely on us—his dogs.

      Chapter Three: Bachelor Breakfast