LITMIR.BIZ

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ho ho!”

      That did it. I might have overlooked the baloney but not the prunes and brussels sprouts. I lumbered out to teach this Freddie a lesson he wouldn’t forget.

      “Hey Freddie, I’m feeling generous this morning. Do you want to learn your lessons through normal pasture fighting or would you rather get an exhibition of dog-karate? I’m a black belt in both, by the way.”

      “Ha! Freddie feed ranch dog karate for breakfast!”

      “Keep talking, guy. You’re digging your own tombstone, and the more you talk, the deeper it gets.”

      You know what the mutt did then? He belched, real loud.

      “Yeah? Well, some dogs learn easy, some dogs learn hard, and some dogs don’t live long enough to learn much of anything.”

      “Yuck yuck! Momma of ranch dog big, fat, and ugly. Have wart on nose, wear gunnysack underpants.”

      I rolled my eyes on that one. This guy was really desperate for something to say. He must have been scared stiff.

      Piecing together the bits of information at my disposal, I pulled up a profile of the little fraud. He had to be one of the pipsqueak breeds—poodle, terrier, Chihuahua. It’s common knowledge that your pipsqueak breeds tend to be short of stature and long on mouth.

      It’s called The Little Dog Complex, if you want to get into the technical side. We’ve worked up per­sonality profiles of all the different breeds, see, and we run into Little Dog Complex quite often.

      In a classic case of LDC, you have a shriveled up, quivering, lickspittle runt of a dog who tries to do with his mouth what he can’t do with the rest of his body. You can spot ’em right away and you don’t even have to see ’em.

      They all talk trash, and the trashier the talk, the smaller the dog.

      This Freddie fit the LDC profile. I mean, he was a classic case right down the line. I was positive that, when I crossed the last little hill between us and looked down the other side, I would see . . .

      HUH?

      You know, one of the things that makes coyotes particularly dangerous characters—I mean, aside from the fact that they are cannibals and have been known to eat ranch dogs—one of the things that makes coyotes particularly dangerous enemies is that they can BARK just like a normal dog.

      You wouldn’t expect a cannibal to bark, would you? I mean, they’re best known for their howling, right? That’s what coyotes are supposed to do, howl.

      But they’re also famous for cheating, and one of their favorite cheating tricks is to bark like a dog. They do this to lure an unsuspecting ranch dog away from the house, don’t you see, and it happens all the time, thousands of times each day in all parts of the country, and even the best and smartest of ranch dogs fall for it once in a while.

      So it was no disgrace, no big deal that I . . . that our equipment came up with faulty profiles and so forth and . . . hey, they were CHEATING, don’t forget that.

      Okay. You’ll never guess who I found waiting on the other side of that little hill. It wasn’t a loudmouthed little poodle, as you might have suspected, but Rip and Snort, the cannibal brothers.

      They had lured me into an ambush, see, by cheating and lying and using cheap tricks, and by the time I figgered it out, they had already . . .

      We needn’t go into every detail. I, uh, gave them the whipping they deserved and hurried back to headquarters to, uh, finish up my morning chores.

      I still had a lot of work to do.

      There just wasn’t time in my busy schedule for fighting and brawling and such childish things.

      Hey, I’m a very busy dog and . . . never mind.

      Let’s just say that too many cannibals in the morning can ruin your day.

      Chapter Two: Try It Again

      Can we start all over?

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It was a normal day on the ranch, early December, as I recall. After barking the sun over the horizon, I went straight back to headquarters and saw no stray dogs or anything else out of the ordinary.

      No fights, no scuffles, no violence of any kind. It was just a totally normal day, and at that point I was ready to launch my investigation into the Phantom Dog Mystery.

      Maybe you’re not familiar with Phantom Dogs, so let me pause here to . . .

      All right, maybe I’m withholding a few shreds of information and taking a few liberties with the truth, but who wouldn’t? Let’s face it, getting suckered into a fight with two coyotes isn’t something that most dogs can be proud of. It makes us look bad.

      It’s embarrassing.

      Humiliating.

      A humbling experience.

      Who wants to be humble? Not me. Humble is what cats are supposed to be, whereas your better breeds of cowdog . . .

      Okay, I’ll tell you the straight story if you’ll promise never ever to repeat it, and I mean NEVER EVER. If word of this ever got into the wrong hands . . . ears, I guess . . . if word of this ever got out amongst the crinimals of the underworld, it could have very serious consequences.

      Have you sworn yourself to silence with a solemn oath? If not, you’re not allowed to finish this story. Put your book away this very minute and go . . . I don’t know what you should do . . . go sit in the corner and count to 50,000.

      The main thing is, be quiet and don’t peek or listen to the following Highly Classified Infor­mation.

      All clear?

      Those two coyotes thrashed me badly. I mean, we’re talking about walking into a couple of buzz saws running at top speed. They not only thrashed me, but they made it look easy and had a great time doing it.

      They may have used cheap tricks to lure me out there, but there was nothing cheap about the whipping they passed out. It was the best whipping money could buy.

      Fellers, I got romped and stomped in so many different ways, I ran out of toes to count ’em. As I’ve said before, when it comes to tough, Rip and Snort are the champs of the world.

      Somehow I managed to escape. How? Good question. Maybe they got bored, shooting baskets with me, but somehow I managed to escape their clutches and once that happened, we had Rocket Dog streaking back to the house—I mean, a cloud of dust and a puff of smoke.

      I knew they wouldn’t follow me up into the yard. They’d never been that brazen and bold before. They’d always chased me, oh, to the shelter belt and then turned back.

      They chased me past the shelter belt, through the front gate, around the house, through Sally May’s precious yard, out the back gate, and YIKES, they were still after me!

      They’d never done that before. This was something entirely new, and where does a dog go when the cannibals chase him right to the house and through the yard, and where were Loper and his shotgun when I really needed them?

      My original plan had been to lose the coyotes up at the shelter belt, don’t you see, and then return to my gunnysack bed under the gas tanks, there to wake up Drover and tell him of my morning adventures.

      Instead, I went streaking past the gas tanks and yelled, “Hey Drover, would you come out here for a second, I need to tell you something!”

      I felt it my duty to inform him that the ranch was under attack, don’t you see, and . . . well, the thought did occur to me that his appearance on the scene might

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