LITMIR.BIZ

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Fall is a beautiful time of the year in the Texas Panhandle, or so I thought before the relatives descended upon the ranch for the Thanksgiving holidays and Sally May went lame in her right leg and I found myself involved in the Case of the One-Eyed Killer Stud Horse.

      Sounds pretty exciting, huh? Just wait until you meet Tuerto, the One-Eyed Killer Stud Horse. He’ll scare the children so bad, they’ll have to sleep with their mothers and dads for a whole week. They’ll see his gotch eye in their dreams, and if they’re not careful, they’re liable to wet the bed.

      Any of you kids who wet the bed, don’t mention my name. Don’t mention your name either. Just pretend it didn’t happen. When Mom and Dad wake up in the night and find that big cold wet spot in the middle of the bed, tell ’em that it rained during the night and the roof leaked.

      Where was I? Under the gas tanks, one of my favorite spots on the ranch and the place where many of my adventures seem to begin. Drover and I were asleep on our gunnysack beds, having returned at daylight from our patrols around the ranch.

      Little did we know what adventures lay in store for us because we were catching a few winks of sleep after putting in a long night of patrol work. I’ve already said that, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat yourself repeat yourself once in a while in a while.

      I love to sleep. Sometimes I dream about bones and long juicy strips of steak fat. I remember one dream in particular when Sally May drove up to the gas tanks and unloaded a strip of steak fat that was half a mile long. That was a dream to remember. It took me two weeks to eat that strip of steak fat. When I was done, I couldn’t walk. Had to crawl around on all-fours with a roller skate under my belly.

      That was one of my all-time great dreams. Another involved a fifty-foot steak bone, I mean a bone as big as a tree. Took me a month and a half to eat that rascal. After I’d finished, I was telling Drover about how I’d just by George destroyed a steak bone that looked like a tree.

      He gave me his usual stupid expression and said, “You mean you ate that tree that looked like a steak bone?”

      I didn’t pay any attention to him, but I spent the next three months sneezing sawdust, which made me wonder. That was all in a dream, of course.

      Bone-dreams and steakfat-dreams are wonderful, but perhaps the wonderfulest dreams of all are the ones that star Beulah the Collie.

      Ah, Sweet Beulah! Be still my heart! Return to thy cage of ribs and venture not forth into the dark night of darkness like a stalking jungle beast venturing and stalking through the inky dark blackness of . . . something. Love, I guess.

      Mercy. Just the thought of that woman gets me in an uproar. Just mention her name and suddenly the same mouth that reduces trees to sawdust and pulverizes monsters begins gushing poetry. Beats anything I ever saw.

      Experts will tell you that I’m a very lucky dog. I mean, it ain’t every dog that has the honor of falling in love with the most beautiful collie gal in the whole entire world. Even more experts would tell you how lucky SHE is.

      Boy, is she lucky, but sometimes I wonder if she knows it. She keeps showing up with that bird dog. I just don’t understand . . . oh well. In my dreams she belongs to me. I don’t allow bird dogs into my dreams.

      Anyways, me and Drover were under the gas tanks, melted and molded into our gunnysacks, and throwing up long lines of Z’s, when all of a sudden I heard Drover say, “Zebras wear pajamas but you can’t spot a leopard with a spyglass.”

      Without opening my eyes or bringing myself to the Full Alert Mode, I ran that statement through my data banks. All at once, it didn’t make sense,

Скачать книгу