LITMIR.BIZ

      If they’d asked my opinion, I would have told ’em to fix it right, but they never want to hear any advice from their dogs. Mark my words, next year at this time, they’ll find a little spring of water bubbling up in the corrals and we’ll have to go through this all over again.

      Oh well. I try to run this ranch in a professional manner, but you can only do so much with a couple of knuckleheaded cowboys.

      At quitting time, Slim fed the horses and headed for his pickup. Drover and I didn’t have any urgent business at Ranch Headquarters, so we decided to hitch a ride and spend the night down at his place.

      See, he’s a bachelor cowboy and has a very intelligent attitude about dogs. He lets us sleep inside the house. Sometimes he sings to us and shares his supper. Sometimes we have mouse hunts before bedtime, and that’s always a lot of fun. The point is that hanging out with Slim is more exciting than occupying a smelly gunnysack bed beneath the gas tanks.

      We reached his shack on Wolf Creek around sundown and followed him up to the porch. When he reached for the door handle, Drover and I were poised to dart inside. It’s a little game we play, don’t you see. The challenge is to see which of us can squirt through the half-opened door and win the I-Got-Here-First Award.

      I guess it’s kind of silly, but what else does a dog have to do when he lives twenty-five miles out in the country?

      So there we were on the porch, poised and quivering with excitement, waiting for Slim to open the door just wide enough so that we could slither inside. But he didn’t open the door.

      Instead, he looked down at us and gave us a scowl. “Where do you think you’re going?”

      Well . . . inside the house, of course.

      “Uh-uh. It’s a nice warm spring evening, and y’all can stay on the porch.”

      What! Stay on the . . . Drover and I exchanged looks of shock and disappointment.

      Slim bent down and looked me in the eye. “You spent half the day wallering around in that mud hole, pooch. You stink and you ain’t going to mess up my nice clean house.”

      And with that, he went inside, leaving his loyal dogs to sort through the rubble of a shattered dream.

      Okay, maybe I’d spent a few minutes in the mud hole . . . a few hours . . . all right, I’d spent most of the afternoon lounging in the water, but when people do that, they call it a bath. How’s a dog supposed to cleanse his body and wash his hair? When we bathe in the overflow of the septic tank, they complain about that too, so what’s a dog supposed to do?

      We try so hard to please these people, but sometimes it seems . . . oh well. There’s no future in brooding over injustice in the world. It appeared that we would have to spend the night on the porch.

      But just as Slim entered the house and closed the screen door behind him, I heard a mysterious ringing sound.

      Chapter Two: A Trespassing Badger

      Drover heard it, too. “Gosh, what’s that?”

      “I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound natural to me.”

      “Me neither. You reckon we ought to bark?”

      “Absolutely, yes. Load up Number Three Barks of Alarm and stand by to fire. Ready? Okay, commence barking!”

      Boy, you should have heard us. We spread all four legs, took a firm grip on the porch floor, and rattled the windows with an amazing barrage of . . .

      “Hank, knock it off! I’m on the phone.”

      Huh? Okay, maybe that ringing sound had come from the telephone and, well, we didn’t need to waste good barking on that, but a dog can never be sure about those ringing sounds until he checks them out. In the Security Business, we bark first and ask questions later.

      I cancelled the alert and moved toward the screen door so that I could hear Slim’s side of the conversation. Here’s what I heard.

      “Lloyd? Well, I’m fine except that we need a rain and I spent most of the day doing plumber work. What? Why yes, I bet I could, and I’d enjoy it, too. Let me check with the boss to be sure. If I don’t call you back, I’ll be there at ten with a horse. Bye.”

      He hung up the phone and dialed a number. “Loper? It’s me. They’re shorthanded at the sale barn and need me to help pen cattle tomorrow. I told Lloyd I’d help him, even though I’d rather stay here and dig sewer lines with you.” He laughed, said good-bye, and hung up the phone.

      I was sitting in front of the screen door when he came breezing out. The door caught me by surprise and whacked me on the nose. “Out of the way, dogs; I get to play cowboy tomorrow.” He stopped and looked down at us. “And y’all can’t go. Sorry.”

      And off he went to feed his horse and hook up the stock trailer.

      Well, for his information, I had a long list of jobs to do on the ranch and didn’t have time to go chasing off with him to “play cowboy.” These people seem to think their dogs just sit around . . . hey, I had work to do and a ranch to run, and it sure wasn’t going to break my heart if I missed out on his little adventure.

      If the dogs don’t stay home and keep things running, who will?

      So that was the end of it. Slim did his chores, returned to the house, fixed himself a canned mackerel sandwich for supper (we didn’t get any of it, not even a bite), and went to bed, leaving the elite troops of the Security Division to sleep on the porch.

      It must have been three or four o’clock in the morning when I was awakened by a sound. I lifted my head and focused both ears on a spot

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