Moonlight Madness. John R. Erickson

up empty.

      Then he leaped to the floor and yelled to the doc, “I feel like I’m eighteen or twenty!”

      When he went to the desk to pay for this deal, he decided to double the fee.

      He wrote ’em a check for three hundred bucks. “A heck of a bargain,” said he.

      And back at the ranch he flew into work like a demon possessed with ambition,

      Built ten miles of fence, hauled nine loads of hay, and bucked all his broncs to submission.

      He did all his work and then he got bored, he couldn’t seem to relax.

      When he tried to sit down, he just couldn’t do it because of those energy attacks.

      So he went back to town, got a ticket for speedin’ and ran his old truck through a rail.

      By sundown he’d got in three fights in a bar and the police had took him to jail.

      So he called up the doctor who’d cured his old age and got him in such of a mess.

      He asked ’bout that stuff they’d put in his bod, and then the doctor confessed.

      “There’s been a mistake, you got diesel, not blood. No wonder it’s turned to a wreck.

      We’ll make you a deal and give your blood back . . . just as soon as you fix that hot check!”

      Hmmm. Well, that was okay, I guessed, if it kept Slim awake and kept me from being smeared all over the dash. But as for it being a great musical experience . . . it wasn’t.

      Well, we were toodling along the Wolf Creek road when all of a sudden . . . holy smokes, the screech of brakes, and I went flying into the dash and almost into the ashtray which was full of stale cigar butts.

      We slid to a stop in the middle of the road. Slim looked out his window at . . . something. I picked myself up off the floorboard and heard him say, “Huh. There’s a dead coon. Looks like she got run over in the night.”

      I rushed to the window to see for myself, which required that I, well, stand in his lap. Sure enough, there was the . . .

      He pushed me away. “Hank, have I told you lately that you stink?”

      Well, yes, as a matter of fact. We had discussed that hateful rumor on several occasions and had decided that there was no truth to it whatsoever. None. Just a pack of vicious lies.

      And Slim didn’t smell so great himself, and people who live in grass huts shouldn’t throw stones.

      Strike matches.

      There’s something they shouldn’t do, and therefore they shouldn’t do it.

      If he didn’t want me to stand in his lap, why didn’t he just come out and say so? He didn’t need to hurl lies and insults at me.

      Dogs have feelings too.

      We were about to drive away from the scene, when all at once we heard barking. I heard it. Slim heard it. But I heard it first. We looked off to the north, toward a grove of chinaberry trees on the west side of the creek.

      Two dogs stood at the base of the tree. Three dogs. And they were looking up into the tree and barking at something. Four dogs, actually, my goodness, a whole pack of dogs, and I knew at once that they were not local ranch dogs.

      The dogs in our neighborhood don’t run in packs. We ranch dogs know better. Packs of dogs almost always get into big trouble, and we’re talking about killing chickens and sheep and chasing cattle around the pasture.

      Hence, from the evidence at hand plus simple logic, I had concluded that these must be stray dogs from town. Pretty impressive, huh? You bet it was, and I even had a pretty good idea who these guys were, which is almost unbelievable that I could come up with such a huge amount of information in just a matter of minutes. Seconds, actually.

      Microseconds.

      Incredibly fast.

      So who were they? You’ll never guess. Don’t even try unless you’re hooked into Data Control, as I am. Just relax and let me handle the hard stuff.

      Do you remember Buster and Muggs and their gang of town thugs? Well, maybe you remember them but you never would have guessed that they were the very ones who were barking at something up in that chinaberry tree.

      Yes, they were back on the ranch and that meant nothing but trouble. I had gone into combat against those guys on several occasions and had given them the thrashing they so richly . . .

      Huh? Slim had opened his door?

      “Go git ’em, Hankie, run ’em off the ranch!”

      I, uh, went into Slow Wags on the tail section and gave him one of our standard looks which said, “Solly, me not spicka you longweech.” Which was true, or partly true.

      He hadn’t pronounced some of his words clearly, see, and words are very important to the, uh, over­all communication process.

      One garbled word can often change the . . .

      Okay, maybe I wasn’t anxious to go ripping out there and engage those four thugs in combat. It’s common knowledge that you should never go swimming right after lunch. It can lead to stomach cramps and drowning, and while this particular situation didn’t actually involve swimming, the principle remained the same . . . even though I hadn’t actually eaten any lunch.

      The point is that you should avoid violent exercise in the middle of the day.

      When Slim saw that I wasn’t going to offer myself as canyon fodder to Buster and Company, he pulled off the road and got out. “Come on, pooch, I’ll go with you.”

      That was more like it. I bailed out of the pickup and Slim and I headed for the chinaberry grove to give those four junior thugs the thrashing they so richly deserved.

      I was feeling somewhat bolder now and took the lead. Hence, I was the first to reach the scene and was the first to deliver an ultimatum to the hoodlums.

      “Okay, boys, I’ll keep it simple. Number One, you’re trespassing on my ranch. Number Two, you’d probably better leave immediately, if not sooner. And Number Three, what’s in the tree that you’re barking at?”

      You probably think that my sudden appearance on the scene caused them to flee in terror, right? Good guess, but that’s not exactly the way it happened.