LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I will.”

      “Good. I hope you’re miserable, but I won’t be.” Slim flashed a smile. “When I get you off the place, I’m going to have a blast.”

      “Oh, yeah?”

      “That’s right. It’ll be like three days without a rotten tooth.”

      “You really think so?”

      Slim hitched up his jeans. “Yes sir, I know so.”

      Loper gazed off into the distance and was quiet for a moment. “You know, we’ve got eight hundred bales of hay in the alfalfa field.”

      Slim blinked. “Yeah, but...”

      “I just had a great idea.” Loper slid his gaze back to Slim. “While I’m gone, maybe you’d like to haul some hay.”

      Slim’s Adam’s apple jumped. “By myself?”

      “You can take the dogs.”

      “Now, Loper . . .”

      Loper flashed a grin. “See, that’s one thing about bosses, Slim. We don’t want the hired hands to be happy when we’re gone.”

      “This ain’t funny.”

      Loper let out a big laugh. “Sure it is. It’s hilarious. While I’m miserable having fun, you’ll be miserable hauling hay. It’ll help ease my pain.” Loper walked over to him and whispered, “Never let the boss know you’re glad to see him go. It’ll come back and bite you every time.”

      Chuckling to himself, Loper walked down to the house. Slim glared after him for a long time, then turned to me. “Me and my big mouth.”

      Right, and I could have told him, but do these guys ever listen to their dogs? No, and that’s why we try to keep our opinions to ourselves.

      The next morning around nine o’clock, Loper loaded Sally May and the children into the family car, and off they went to the mountains. I led them all the way up to the mailbox on the county road and sent them on their way with Barks of Farewell. That done, I made my way back to headquarters and went looking for Slim.

      I had a feeling this was going to be a hard day, and he would need all the support we dogs could provide. I mean, he’d been tagged with a pretty tough assignment—hauling eight hundred bales of alfalfa hay all by himself.

      On any ranch with modern equipment, that wouldn’t have been such a difficult job, but our outfit did everything The Cowboy Way. That means we shunned all laborsaving devices and relied entirely on junk machinery.

      See, we had only thirty acres of irrigated alfalfa, and that wasn’t quite enough to justify the expense of good equipment. Loper bought all our machinery at farm auctions, and took considerable pride in getting what he called “good deals.”

      Ha. Those guys spent half their summers reading repair manuals, running to town for parts, turning wrenches, and screaming at gutted hay balers and swathers, whose parts lay scattered all over the floor of the machine shed.

      But every now and then the machinery held together long enough to put up some of the hay into bales, and at that point they had to be hauled out of the field and unloaded in the “stack lot,” an area that had been fenced off so that the cattle wouldn’t plunder the hay and scatter it over half the ranch.

      Under ordinary conditions, our hay-hauling involved the use of an old flatbed truck and three people: Sally May to drive the truck through the field; Slim to pitch the bales up on the truck; and Loper to stack the hay on the back of the truck.

      Do you see what Slim had done with his big mouth? He would have to do all three of those jobs by himself. I felt some pity for poor Slim. I mean, slaving in a hay field in the heat of summer wasn’t something I would wish on a friend, or even an enemy. On the other hand, he had walked into it with his mouth wide open and . . . well, what can you say?

      Some people never learn, or if they learn, it has to be in the hardest possible way. Slim seemed to be one of those people. Now, if he had consulted his dogs, if he had listened to my advice . . . oh, well. We’ve already touched on that, and there’s no more to be said.

      The worst part of it was that we dogs would have to listen to him moan and gripe for three long days. It would a tough assignment for those of us in the Security Division, as we shared Slim’s pain and eased him through this difficult period in his life. Drover and I would have our hands cut out for us.

      When I returned to the yard gate, Slim wasn’t there, but I found Drover making idle conversation with the cat. Pete.

      When he saw me approaching the gate, Kitty Kitty gave me one of his insolent smirks and said, “Well, well, Hankie the Wonderdog is here.”

      “You got that right, kitty. Out of the way.” I pushed him aside and managed to step on his tail, tee hee, which wasn’t exactly an accident. “Oops, sorry, Pete. If you’d find some other place to loaf, you wouldn’t get stepped on.” I marched up to Drover and gave him a stern glare. “What’s going on around here?”

      “Oh, hi. Are you talking to me?”

      “Correct. What’s going on around here?”

      “Oh, not much. Pete and I were just talking about the weather.”

      “I see. And what did you decide?”

      “Well, let me think.” He rolled his eyes around. “I think we decided that it’ll probably do whatever it does, and we’ll just wait and see.”

      “That’s very impressive, Drover.”

      “Thanks.”

      “How long did it take you and the cat to decide that the weather will do whatever it does?”

      “Oh . . . about fifteen minutes, I guess. We argued about it for a while.”

      “How interesting.”

      “Yeah, Pete said it was going to be hot and dry, but I said it would be dry and hot. Then we decided we didn’t know for sure.”

      “I see. Do I need to remind you that mingling with cats is against regulations?”

      “Well, we weren’t mingling. We were just talking.”

      Pete nodded. “That’s right, Hankie, we weren’t mingling.”

      “Stay out of this, kitty. This is dog business and nobody wants to hear what you have to say.” Back to Drover. “You were mingling, and unless you can come up with a good reason for mingling with a cat, this will have to go into my report.”

      “Oh, darn. Well, let me think.” He wadded up his face and seemed to be probing his tiny mind. “You know, I’m not real sure what ‘mingle’ means, but it rhymes with ‘tingle.’”

      “It rhymes with ‘tingle,’ but I don’t care.”

      “And ‘care’ rhymes with ‘underwear.’”

      Pete’s face lit up with a smile. “Good point, Drover! Why, with just a little imagination, we could compose a poem: ‘We tingle as we mingle, but I don’t care/’Cause Wonderdog Hankie lost his underwear.’”

      Does this strike you as silly and childish? It did me, but there’s more. Hang on while we change chapters.

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