LITMIR.BIZ

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turned on the stove burner and left the gas running whilst he scratched a wooden match across the matchbox. As usual, it took several scratches to light the match, so when he finally put it under the pan of water, we had a little propane explosion.

      As usual, he seemed surprised. Duh. I mean, propane blows up when you leave it running. There are no exceptions. It happens every time, and the longer you dawdle, the bigger the pow.

      If you wonder why cowboys don’t have hair on the back of their hands, this is the reason. Slim has even lost eyebrows.

      Incredible.

      Dogs don’t enjoy explosions in the morning. We would like to help our people when they don’t function well, but do they ever listen to their dogs or ask for our advice? No. So we go through this every day of the world.

      He finally got the water boiling and dumped some coffee into the pan. He waited a few minutes, then sloshed it into a cup. He hadn’t washed that cup in two years, by the way, and it was exactly the color of two-year old coffee.

      After downing a couple of slurps, he crept out on the porch in his drawers and a T-shirt and brought in an armload of firewood. Stepping over me and Drover…stepping over Stubtail, who was sprawled out on the floor, he picked his way across the room toward the…

      “Hank, move!”

      …picked his way across the room to the stove, tripping on Drover in the process. He opened the stove door and placed a strip of dry cedar bark on the coals, blew on the coals until the bark caught fire, and added a few sticks of hackberry. Before long, he had a nice little fire going, closed the door, and set the damper.

      Then he glared down at us and grumbled, “If this outfit depended on y’all to build a fire, we’d freeze to death.”

      Oh brother. I ignored him.

      You know, it’s strange that our story should start with a fire, because that’s how it’s going to…no, that’s all I can say. I mean, it was such an awful…

      We can’t talk about it, sorry, and don’t beg or whine. I have to be firm on this. You know how I am about the children. Some parts of this job are just too scary for the little guys, and there’s no fire insurance for spectators. I mean, what if your book bursted into flames?

      Don’t laugh. It could happen.

      I’m not at liberty to reveal any more information because it’s highly classified and you’re not supposed to know any of this, so the next big question is…do you want to go on with the story?

      If not, brush your teeth and go to bed. If you’re still with me, thanks. This is going to be a toughie.

      Where were we? Oh yes, Sally May’s rotten little cat. He drives me batty, and he knows that he drives me batty. He thrives on driving me batty. It seems to be the whole purpose of his life. He went to kitty college and got a degree in Batty Driving, but one of these days…

      We weren’t talking about the cat.

      Tell you what, let’s take a little break and change chapters. If you don’t show up for Chapter Two, I’ll have to go on without you.

      Chapter Two: A Robot on the Porch!

      Okay, I had been up most of the night working on reports. Drover was sprawled across the floor like spilled milk, sleeping his life away. Slim had managed to build a cup of coffee without blowing up the kitchen and had chunked up the fire in the wood stove, and now he was sitting in his big easy chair, like a king in his castle, with a loyal dog at his feet. But then…

      Suddenly Earoscanners began picking up something outside the house. I made adjustments on the antennas until we were getting a clear signal. Data Control chewed on that and sent the alert:

      “Tires on gravel, possible intrusion of unidentified vehicle, activate Warning System and prepare to launch!”

      We don’t get much time to respond to these Morning Intrusions, and we never know who it might be. It doesn’t matter. We have to give a professional response, ready or not, and that’s what I did. The instant DC’s message flashed across the screen, I went into Stage One Barking. It’s wired into the system, don’t you see. It’s automatic, and loud.

      WOOF!

      Slim had just taken a slurp of coffee, and my woof goosed him so much, he spilled hot coffee on his shirt, shorts, and naked legs.

      “Ow! Moron!” He flew out of the chair, spilling more coffee on the threadbare carpet, and glared at me like…I don’t know what, and screeched, “What’s wrong with you!”

      What was wrong with me was that I was a highly-trained professional cowdog in charge of First Response Security. An unidentified vehicle had just entered our airspace. We’d picked it up on Earoscanners and were tracking its every movement. Data Control had sent down a Stage One Alert and was assembling the Firing Data.

      That’s what was wrong with me.

      “Meathead! You scalded my legs!”

      Oh brother. I didn’t scald his legs. He scalded his own skinny legs with his own coffee, and if he’d been wearing pants instead of sitting around half-naked, he wouldn’t have scalded anything.

      Oh, and did we have time for this silly discussion? An intruder, possibly an enemy agent, was creeping up on the house!

      I can’t be blamed for the lack of discipline on this ranch. We should have been scrambling jets and launching dogs. We should have been into Stage Two or Stage Three Barking. We should have been doing SOMETHING to defend his house and my ranch from Enemy Intrudement. Instead, he was yelling at the Head of Security and calling him a meathead.

      In many ways, this is a lousy job. They don’t pay us enough to put up with this. Oh well.

      So there we were, carrying on a silly conversation in the midst of a crisis, but things kind of took care of themselves. By that time, Slim could hear the sound of tires crunching gravel outside. His eyes grew wide and he muttered, “Good honk, somebody just pulled up!”

      Duh.

      He rushed to the front window and peeked through the dusty, barf-colored curtains that had been there since the Civil War. “Oh great!”

      Apparently it wasn’t good news, because he was transformed into some kind of wild man. Maybe he didn’t want to fight the intruder in his undershorts.

      Wait, that doesn’t sound right. I didn’t mean to say that the intruder was showing up in his undershorts. That would be ridiculous. Intruders don’t do that. I meant to say that Slim…let’s just skip it.

      As we’ve discussed before, Slim is usually not a ball of flames first thing in the morning. Sometimes we need to check his pulse to be sure he isn’t a corpse. Remember that only minutes before, I had mistaken him for a mummy.

      Give him two cups of coffee and thirty minutes of solitude, staring at flies on the wall, and he’ll come around, but this deal had wrecked his train. He became an explosion of arms, legs, and desperate expressions.

      He made a dash down the dark hallway and vanished into his bedroom. There, he tripped over the boots he’d left in the middle of the floor. I didn’t see this with my own eyes but heard it, and knew the story: He never puts a boot into the closet if he can leave it in the middle of the floor.

      Then I heard him say, “What in the cat hair is that old man doing over here at this hour of the morning?”

      Who?

      Bam Bam Bam!

      Yipes, somebody was banging on the door! Well, we’d gotten an Alert from DC and our procedures were very

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