Huh? Had I heard a voice?
Yes, and it came again. “It’s probably Loper, so knock it off.”
Okay, that was Slim’s voice and maybe our blasts of barking had disturbed his breakfast. How’s a dog supposed to know? We just try to do our jobs, but speaking of breakfast, I left the artillery and made my way over to his chair. Maybe…
“No.”
What a grouch. I hadn’t begged for food. What kind of lunatic would eat a cold, leftover, boiled turkey neck for breakfast anyway? It looked revolting.
“You want a bone?”
No.
He pitched it in the air and, well, what could I do but snag it? Snarf. It crunched up pretty nicely. Turkey neck bones don’t look so great and a lot of dogs wouldn’t touch one first thing in the morning, but they’re not all that bad.
Crunch, crack.
Pretty good in fact. Give me a choice between a neck bone and a plate of scrambled eggs, and I’ll take the bone every time. You know why? Because in Slim’s house, a decent, civilized breakfast will never happen, so we take anything we can get.
As a matter of fact…
“That’s all you get.”
You see how he is? The man seems to think that a dog has only one thing on his mind and all we ever do is chase after the next meal. It’s very discouraging and even insulting. For his infor-mation, the mind of a dog is an awesome thing.
The only reason dogs aren’t listed among the world’s greatest philosophers and poets and composers is that we’re stuck with the job of protecting knot-heads like Slim Chance—for which we receive no credit or appreciation, only criticism and scorn.
Free us from that burden and see what happens. We’ll write the great books, think the great thoughts, and compose the great slumphonies.
Timpanies. We’ll compose the greatest timpanies ever heard.
That doesn’t sound right. It drives me batty when the perfect word is right on the tang of my torque and I can’t come up with it.
The word I’m searching for has to do with fiddles and horns and a guy standing on a platform, wearing tusk and tails, and waving a little stick around.
Phooey.
You know what? I don’t care and I’m not going to waste half my life looking for a word I don’t care about. The important poink is that dogs need nutrition and energy, and we can’t get it by eating sheet music.
We need FOOD, and would it drive the ranch into bankrubble if Slim shared one more turkey vertebra with his best friend in the whole world?
Was that unreasonable?
I mean, we ask so little of this life!
I unloosed a moan from deep in my throatalary region, moved my front paws up and down, and beamed him an expression of Adoration and Starvoration.
I studied his face. His mouth was stiff, cold, lifeless, without even a hint of warmth or compossem. This wasn’t going to work. But wait…
There was a flicker of something…a softness came into his eyes…his lips stirred ever so slightly and the corners moved upwardly at the corners.
Holy smokes, IT WAS A SMILE!
“Okay, pooch, one more. See if you can catch it.”
With his thumb, he flipped a vertebra high into the air. I loaded the Reentry Data into the computer and moved into the Recovery Position. When the object began its downward plunge, I was waiting and snapped it right out of the sky.
Crunch.
Oh yes! The bonds of our bondage had bonded, and we were friends again, friends forever, friends to the bone!
A little humor there, did you get it? “Friends to the BONE,” as in a turkey vertebra. Ha ha.
Anyway, he was pleased and proud. He not only smiled, he uttered a chuckle, and don’t forget, this was early morning, not his best time of day. “Nice work, pup. You’ve got talent nobody ever dreamed was there.”
Right. Did we have time for one more?
No, because at that very moment, we heard pounding at the door. Our pleasant episode came to a sudden end and I was back on duty.
“Symphony,” that’s the word I was looking for.
Chapter Two: Police At the Door!
Bam, bam, bam!
I whirled around, did a quick-draw, and fired off three barks at the door. Drover uttered one squeak, dashed down the hall, and vanished in Slim’s bedroom. The little weenie.
Slim remained in his chair. “Come in, Loper, it ain’t locked!”
Loper? Okay, he was the boss, the guy who owned the ranch. I trotted over to the door and waited to clear him through Security. When the door swung open, I saw a man who wasn’t Loper, not even close to being Loper.
I didn’t know him, had never seen him in my entire life. He was dressed in a blue uniform with some kind of badge on the shirt pocket. He wore black Wellington boots and a felt cowboy hat, and…good grief, a thick black belt with a pistol on the right side!
He was armed! Was this one of the pirates? No, they were monkeys, so skip that.
I shot a glance at Slim. His mouth fell open and his eyes did too. Those were alarming signs. Just to be on the safe side, I scrambled away from the door and took refuge…that is, I set up a defensive position behind Slim’s chair, where I could monitor the situation and fire off a few barks if necessary.
The stranger spoke. “Did I come at a bad time?”
“Bobby, whenever you show up is a bad time.”
Hold everything. Bobby? That name had a familiar ring around the bathtub. A familiar ring, let us say. I had heard it before and maybe I knew the guy: Chief Deputy Bobby Kile. Remember him? You need to pay attention.
Okay, I knew him pretty well and we’d even worked some crinimal cases together. Remember the Case of the Monkey Burglar? We worked that one as a team and sent a crook to the slammer.
Wait, hold everything and check this out: monkey burglar and monkey pirates. Was this some kind of clue? No, never mind. Skip it.
Anyway, here he was—Deputy Kile, that is, not a monkey—standing in the door of Slim’s shack at seven o’clock in the morning. And did I mention that he was holding some kind of big cooking pot? He was. What was going on around here?
Slim must have been wondering the same thing. “Well, you might as well come in. What’s in the pot?”
“Lamb’s quarter greens. We have a bunch of it growing in the shipping pens. My wife picked some and made a batch for you. She worries that you’ll get scurvy, living alone out here in the Wild West.”
Slim laughed. “Scurvy. Never even considered it. Set it in the kitchen.”
Deputy Kile went into the kitchen and left the pot on the table. At that point, I noticed an important detail: he had a wad of chewing gum stuck to the seat of his pants. A dog notices those little details.
He came back into the living room and stared at Slim. “You dress like this all the time?”
“I