LITMIR.BIZ

      We went ripping out of the corral, me in the lead and Drover bringing up the rear. We zoomed past the saddle shed, under the front gate, and on an eastward course that would take us directly to the house. However, you might say that we never got there.

      I knew something was wrong when I ran into a hogwire fence, hit that sucker dead center and put a pretty severe kink in my neck.

      “Halt! Hold it right here! Unless I’m mistaken, someone has thrown up a hogwire fence. Obviously they don’t want us to sound the alarm. The question is, why?”

      “Yeah, but why?”

      “I just asked that question.”

      “Oh.”

      “It wouldn’t hurt, Drover, if you paid a little more attention to what’s going on around here.”

      “Okay. You don’t reckon we got into the garden by mistake, do you?”

      “Impossible. The garden is a full fifteen de­grees north of our present location. No, Drover, this is no garden. This is a new fence, thrown up by someone or something to keep us from warning the house. And you know what that means.”

      “Sure do.”

      “What?”

      There was a long silence. “Well . . . it means that somebody around here knows how to dig postholes in the dark.”

      “Yes, but I’m talking about a deeper meaning.”

      “Oh.”

      “A meaning far darker and more sinister. It could mean, Drover, that this ranch is about to be attacked.”

      I heard him gasp. “By the fiends?”

      “That’s a possibility we can’t ignore. Now the question is, how do we get past this barrier they’ve thrown into our path?”

      I began pacing. My mind seems to work better when I pace. But it wasn’t easy, pacing at this particular point in space, because the area was overgrown with weeds and noxious plants—a rather interesting clue, since this was around the first of May and weeds and noxious plants don’t often appear so early in the Panhandle.

      I salted that piece of information away for future reference and continued pacing. I could feel the weeds snapping beneath my feet. It takes a pretty stout variety of weed to keep me from pacing, especially when I’m putting clues together and following them to a logical conclusion.

      “Drover, we have two contingency plans for a fence of this type: one, we go over it; two, we destroy it. Either way, it’s nothing to sneeze at.”

      Drover sneezed.

      I glared at him. “Why do you do things like that?”

      “Like what?”

      “When I say we’ve got this thing licked, you lick your chops. When I say this is nothing to sneeze at, you sneeze. Sometimes I think you’re trying to make a mockery of my investigations.”

      “Doe. I’b allergic to domato plets.”

      “That’s all?”

      “Cross by hard and hobe to die.” He crossed his heart.

      “All right. Then the question we have to face now is—if you’re allergic to tomato plants, why are these weeds making you sneeze? Until we answer that question . . .”

      Suddenly I froze. My nose shot up, just as a bolt of lightning struck one of the cottonwoods down by the creek. The flash was followed by a loud boom.

      “Wait a minute, I think I’ve got it!”

      “Oh-h-h, I think I got it too!” Drover was lying on the ground with his paws over his eyes.

      “Get up, Drover. This case is taking on an en­tirely new dimension. Sniff the air and tell me what you smell.”

      “Okay.” He pushed himself up and sniffed that air. “I sbell domato plets.” He sneezed.

      “Exactly! And where does one usually find tomato plants?”

      “Uh . . . in a garden?”

      “Exactly! Our clues are falling into place. Fol­low them to the logical answer.”

      “Okay. The answer is . . . yes.”

      “No.”

      “Doesn’t it have to be one or the other?”

      “Yes and no.”

      “Oh, okay.”

      “In most instances, a simple yes or no will do, but in this particular case the answer is more complicated, for you see, Drover, we have stumbled into a garden.”

      “Isn’t that what I said a while ago?”

      “You were close, very close considering your limited, uh, gifts. You did in fact suggest that we had stumbled into the garden by mistake.”

      “I thought that’s what I said.”

      “But what you didn’t take into account, Drover, was that the entire garden had been moved fifteen degrees to the south!”

      “No fooling?”

      “Yes. We have walked into a trap.”

      “Oh.”

      “The purpose of which was to keep us from sounding the alarm. But what they didn’t take into account was our superior barking ability.”

      “You mean . . .”

      “Exactly. We may be cut off from the house, Drover, but we can still sound the alarm. On the count of three, we’ll commence barking. One! And I want you to put your heart and soul into it. Two! Just by George bark as you’ve never barked in all your life. Three!”

      “Now?”

      “Let ’er rip!”

      Fellers, we leaned into the task and did some heavy-duty barking. Drover did his usual “yip-yip-yip, pause, yip-yip-yip, pause, yip-yip-yip, etc.” And on each yip, all four of his feet left the ground. Funny how he does that.

      I added my deep masculine roar, the same brand of barking that has struck terror in the hearts of monsters, coyotes, coons, badgers, skunks, rattlesnakes, and cats—not to mention cattle, which are my specialty.

      Loper wasn’t what you would call swift in responding to our call. It took us a good fifteen minutes of solid barking to get a light on in the house. At last we heard his voice:

      “SHUT UP, YOU IDIOTS!!”

      We kept it up, just barked our hearts out. Suddenly we saw a flash of light, followed by a boom and a sprinkling of buckshot in the trees.

      Drover stopped barking. “Is he shooting at us?”

      I gave him a withering glare. “How dumb do you think he is? He must have seen one of the fiends. Keep barking and maybe we can get him down here.”

      We sent up another salvo of high explosive barking. Before long, I saw the beam of a flashlight and heard the yard gate slam. At last we were getting somewhere.

      “Keep it up, Drover. We want to give him our coordinates. Otherwise, he’ll never hear us with all this thunder.”

      We kept up a steady barrage. The flashlight came closer, then pieces of Loper began to take

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