LITMIR.BIZ

      Oh, and by the way, Drover managed to slither outside without getting kicked. I don’t know how he always…oh well.

      I sat down on the edge of the porch, as far away from Mister Grump as I could get. I turned my back on him too. He didn’t deserve the companionship of a dog, and I wasn’t sure we would ever be friends again.

      The rain made a steady sizzle on the tin roof, and my goodness, the air smelled wonderful—fresh, damp, heavy with the aroma of sagebrush and old leaves and new grass that was trying to green up. During a drought, we forget how good the world can smell when it gets a drink.

      We sat on the porch for a while, listening to the soft rain and breathing in the delicious air and watching daylight creep over the eastern sky. Drover was sitting nearby, and I noticed that he wore a silly grin on his mouth.

      “What are you grinning about?”

      “Me? Oh, nothing much.”

      “I’m sure that’s true, but when someone grins on this ranch, I need to know what’s going on.”

      “Well, I had a crazy dream.”

      “Oh? Then we needn’t waste any more time. I’m not interested in your dreams.”

      “Thanks. I dreamed I was a famous astronaut, flying through space in a saddle-up.”

      “In a saddle-up?”

      “Yeah, one of those things they launch into space.”

      I heaved a sigh. “Drover, get it right. If you were flying through space, it was in a satellite, which has nothing to do with a saddle.”

      “They sound the same.”

      “They’re not the same.”

      “Well, mine had a saddle.”

      “Okay, your satellite had a saddle, and I have no interest in hearing the rest of your dream.”

      He gave me a sly grin. “I haven’t gotten to the good part. I robbed a train.”

      “You robbed a train? In outer space?”

      “Yeah, it was a whole train-load of bananas!”

      I stared into the vast emptiness of his gaze. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this. In the first place, it’s ridiculous. If someone were listening to this conversation, he’d think we’re just a couple of goofballs. In the second place, that wasn’t your dream, it was MINE!”

      “Gosh, you mean…”

      “Stop butting into my dreams! Find your own.”

      “Hee hee hee.”

      “And don’t giggle in the miggle of my lecture!”

      “If that was your dream, you were asleep! Hee hee. I caught you!”

      Huh?

      I paced to the edge of the porch and gazed off into the distance. Many thoughts tramped across the parade ground of my mind. “Drover, in your own sneaking, slithering way, you’ve exposed a shameful truth about the Security Division. We both slept when we should have been guarding the house. Let’s try to put it behind us. Agreed?”

      “Okay, but what about my Chicken Marks?”

      I marched back to him and laid a paw upon his shoulder. “I’ll handle that. Nobody will ever know. Now, let’s shape up and try to do better.”

      Pretty touching, huh? You bet. Our human friends have no idea how hard we strive to be good dogs. Sometimes we fail, but we’re never content with failure. We just have to pick ourselves up and march onward, knowing that…well, if we mess up again, we won’t tell anyone.

      The somber mood of this occasion was suddenly shattered by Slim’s voice. “The dadgum rain quit!”

      I had been so distracted by departmental business, I hadn’t noticed this crucial detail. I lifted Earatory Scanners and sure enough, our instruments confirmed that the rain had stopped.

      A shiver passed through my biver…through my body, let us say. Why the shiver? Because I knew that Slim would be mad or half-mad for the rest of the day, and the job of cheering him up would fall squarely on us—his dogs.

      Chapter Three: Bachelor Breakfast

      Okay, Slim had been sitting in a chair on the porch, and suddenly sprang out of the chair. That was pretty remarkable, because the man wasn’t famous for springing around in the early morning hours, but he sprang out of his chair and headed for the rain gauge, which was nailed to the top of a gate post.

      Wait. Should the word be “sprang” or “sprung?” You know me, I want to get it right. Why? The kids. We don’t want them going around, talking like a bunch of peanut-crunching chimpanzees. Here, let’s take a closer look at this:

      Tic, tack, toe.

      Rick, rack, roe.

      Ting, tang, tongue.

      Spring, sprang, sprung.

      And there’s our answer. “Slim sprung out of his chair.” Wow, is this amazing or what? Your ordinary mutts know nothing about this stuff, and we’re talking about your town dogs, your poodles and your Chihuahuas. They’re pampered and lazy, and they never give a thought to the future of this nation. If the kids start talking like monkeys, they don’t care.

      You know who cares? Cowdogs. Heads of Ranch Security. ME.

      Now…where were we? Hmm. Bananas? Yes. When monkeys aren’t crunching peanuts and leaving shells all over the place, they’re consuming large quantities of bananas and speaking gibberish. This nation will never prosper as long as…

      Wait. We were on the porch, right? And Slim Chance had sprung out of his chair and was walking barefoot toward the rain gauge, right? Now we’re on it.

      You know, dogs see a lot of things we can’t talk about. Imagine this scene. In day’s first light, a full-grown, half-naked cowboy-scarecrow was walking barefoot across an expanse of mud, in an area that normal people would describe as “the yard.” Ha. See, most of the grass in Slim’s so-called yard had perished in the drought, leaving a few brave stalks of ragweed that were still clinging to life. Mostly, the “yard” was pure dirt, only now it had turned into mud.

      The guy was walking barefooted through the MUD, on his way to the rain gauge, and he didn’t seem to care that mud was oozing up between his toes. I’m not kidding. Even on the porch, I could see it.

      He made it to the gate and snatched the glass tube out of the rain gauge holder. He brought the tube close to his face and glared at it. “Twenty-five hundredths and a spider!” He turned a flaming pair of eyes toward the sky and shook his fist. “Sissy clouds! We need five inches and you give us twenty-five hundredths!”

      And then…this was hard to believe…he drew back his arm and threw the rain gauge as far as he could throw it, which was pretty far. It sailed across the gravel drive and shattered against the south side of the saddle shed.

      A ghoulish smile leaped across his mouth and he yelled, “There, by grabs, see how you like that!”

      Amazing.

      He stomped back to the porch and threw himself into his chair. Hard. He seemed to be expressing his anger by throwing his body into the chair, don’t you see, and never suspected that it would tip over backwards. Guess what? It did. His muddy bare feet shot up from the floor and arched above his head, and he and the chair went crashing

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