Chapter Ten: Caution: Hazardous and Scary Material!

I sat down on the sidewalk, approximately ten feet in front of the porch, just beyond the halo of the porch light.

Behind me, I could hear the motor of the mysterious black car running. There was something about the car that bothered me. In fact, there was something about the entire case that bothered me.

On the surface, it appeared that The Case of the Mysterious Tricker Trees was moving along very well. I had suspects, a motive, and Drover’s screwball conspiracy. But still . . . 

Maybe there was something in the night air that made me uneasy. It was very dark, and off to the north I heard the moan of coyotes. Or maybe it was that business about the Tricker Trees that bothered me.

That was the one piece of the puzzle that hadn’t fallen into place. Why would strangers come to the ranch at that hour and ask for trees? And if they wanted trees, why had they gone into the house?

I had been in Slim’s house that very day and I knew for a fact that he didn’t keep trees in there. Mold, yes. Spiders, yes. Mice, yes. But no trees.

Off to my right I heard Drover’s front paws scratching on the fence. The runt still hadn’t made it into the yard.

“Hurry up and get over here. There’s no reason why it should take you five minutes to climb over a fence.”

“Well, I just can’t seem to make it, Hank. I guess my legs aren’t as strong as yours. Would it be all right if I stayed out here?”

“No, it wouldn’t be all right, but if that’s the best you can do, it’s the best you can do. You’re the one who has to live with yourself.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t know where else to go.”

Drover’s yapping distracted me from my primary job, watching the front door. In other words, for a moment or two I lost concentration.

I didn’t hear the front door open. I didn’t hear footsteps on the porch. I didn’t know that I was about to be attacked until I turned around and saw . . . 

I hesitate to describe what I saw. I mean, it was so horrible, so frightening, so blood-chilling that if I told the whole story, it might have a bad effect on the kids.

You know me. I worry about the kids. I don’t mind giving ’em a little thrill now and then, but hey, when it comes to the real heavy-duty scary stuff . . . I don’t know, it bothers me.

What I’m saying is that if there’s any kids around who might have a bad reaction to heavy-duty hardcore scary stuff, you’d better take up their books right now before this thing gets wild.

Because it’s fixing to get WILD.

Pause

Pause

Paws

Pa’s

Pas (French)

You ready? Take a deep seat and grab hold of something solid. Here we go.

Okay. Let me set the scene again: dark night, coyotes howling off in the distance, a whisper of wind sighing through the bare limbs of the cottonwoods, and, behind me, the rumble of the motor of the Mysterious Black Car.

Just for a moment I had allowed Drover to distract me. Then I heard a sound to my left. It seemed to be coming from the porch. I turned my head and saw . . . 

HUH?

Holy smokes, you won’t believe this, hang on because here it comes . . . 

TWO SKELETONS, ONE GHOST, ONE PIRATE, AND ONE WITCH!!!!

Fellers, I still didn’t believe in skeletons or ghosts, but there they were right in front of me. Well, my ears flew up, just as though somebody had tied strings to them and give the strings a yank, I mean, we’re talking about ears that almost flew off my head.

My eyes popped open, and I think they even crossed. My lower jaw dropped a good six inches and my tongue fell another six inches beyond that.

The hair on my back stood straight up, and I mean every single hair from my eyebrows all the way out to the tip of my tail, stood straight up, you’d have thought I was a porcupine.

Naturally, my first reaction to this nightmare was to bark, but when I tried to activate my barking mechanism, what I got was a squeak, not a bark.

Squeaking at goblins and skeletons is a poor response, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice. So I squeaked.

Up to this point I hadn’t known whether these goblins were friendly or the dog-eating variety, but I soon found out. One of the skeletons saw me there, and at that very moment he or she (with skeletons it’s hard to distinguish hes from shes) made claws with his or her hands, jumped at me, and screeched a poisonous magic word: “BUGABOOOOO!”

By then my feet and legs were moving. I could hear my claws scraping across the sidewalk, but they were moving at such an incredible high rate of speed that they couldn’t get traction.

In other words, I was running in place, and I can reveal that my claws were throwing up sparks on the cement, and I mean showers of sparks that lit up the night.

You’ve seen guys welding after dark? Same deal: sparks, fire, smoke, the whole nine yards.

Well, the first skeleton had laid a curse on me with that poisonous magic word, and that would have been serious enough in itself, but just then the other goblins came after me.

The second skeleton had a mysterious paper bag in his left hand. Gripping it at the top, he or she raised it above his or her head and began shaking it. It contained something, perhaps roots or magic herbs or even bones.

Yes, they were bones. See, when skeletons go walking around, sometimes their bones fall off and they carry a paper sack to hold all the loose ones. When they get back home, or wherever it is that skeletons go when they’ve finished terrorizing people and dogs, when they get back home, they have to stick all the loose bones back in place, otherwise they would soon fall apart.

So there you are, a little footnote on the behavior of skeletons.

And there I was, spinning my tires, so to speak, on the cement, and being attacked by two skeletons. Serious enough, right? Well, you ain’t heard it all yet.

Suddenly this little witch jumped off the porch, and in case you haven’t been attacked by any witches lately, let me describe this one. She was dressed in black, had a nose as long as a carrot, was missing two front teeth, and wore a very strange kind of pointed hat on her . . . well, on her head, of course.

In one hand she carried an object that resembled a broom. In fact it was a broom. Yes, I’m sure it was. In her other hand she carried a round orange object that resembled a punkin, but it was like no punkin I had ever seen before.

It was made of plastic, see, had a handle on it, and also a face. I know that sounds crazy, a punkin with a face, but this punkin by George had a face on it.

Anyway, this little witch . . . I say little witch, but come to think of it, maybe she wasn’t so little. Maybe she was pretty big. In fact, she was HUGE.

This huge witch, she must have stood, oh, seven feet three inches tall, biggest woman I’d ever seen, she jumped off the porch and yelled, “Tricker Tree!”

And at that very same moment the ghost said, “WOOOOOO!” and he came flying off the porch.

Did I describe that ghost? Scariest thing I ever saw. No ears, no nose, no hair. Just two horrible eyes and a big round mouth. Oh yes, he was wearing tennis shoes.

And then the Pirate came after me too. Descrip­tion: little bitty short guy, must have been a midget or a widget or whatever you call those short guys, only this one was wearing a black patch over one eye, had two teeth missing and a big scar on the left side of his face, terrible scar with blood still showing, and he carried a sword.

Oh, and he was wearing tennis shoes too. That was another interesting clue, a ghost and a pirate wearing tennis shoes, but you might say that I wasn’t in any position to put those two clues to­gether and come up with a hypotenuse.

I mean, I was under attack, fellers. It was time to do some serious lifesaving.

One last thing about the pirate. When he jumped at me, he waved his sword and yelled those same two words: “Tricker Tree!”

Speaking of trees, it was time for this old dog to head for tall timber, but before I could get that deal accomplished, I had to endure one last shocker.

Slim and Miss Viola came to the door and looked out. Do you think they came to my rescue? Do you think they ran for a gun and started shooting? Do you think they even lifted their voices to help their loyal dog, their Head of Ranch Security?

No sir. Here’s exactly what they did. Miss Viola slapped her knees, threw back her head, and laughed. That’s right. She laughed!

And are you ready to hear what Slim did? He roared with laughter, and then he had the gall to yell, “Git ’em, Hankie, sic ’em, boy!”

Well, I had never been so . . . after years and years of loyal service . . . 

Let’s just say that this came as a bitter disappointment to me. It would have served them right if I had been eaten by those two skeletons. That would have left their dumb old ranch defenseless.

The time had come for me to, shall we say, fall back to another position. Or to put it another way, to run for my life.

At last my claws got traction on the sidewalk, and I went zooming away from this collection of goblins, spooks, and crazy people. No ordinary dog could have . . . 

Only trouble was that I forgot to jump when I came to the fence, guess my mind was on other things, and boy did I come to a sudden stop, center-punched that dadgum fence and liked to have broke my nose off at the roots.

Well, I bounced off the fence, backed off and took another run at it and this time went flying over the top.

I don’t know who parked the wheelbarrow over there, and don’t particularly care, but it was a dumb place to park a wheelbarrow. I knocked it over, scrambled to my feet, and escaped a terrible death by a matter of inches.

It was then that I noticed that my legs were wet—very strange because I hadn’t come in contact with any water whatsoever.

Beat anything I ever saw.

You may think the scary part is over, but just wait until you find out what happened in the cake house. Don’t read the next chapter unless you’re pretty derned tough.