Chapter Nine: Drover Confesses

Iset my sights on headquarters and turned on the speed. I roared past those big rolls of rusted barbed wire and the post pile. I was kind of sore at myself for burning so much daylight and . . . was that a cottontail rabbit that came out of the post pile?

I put on the brakes and slid to a stop. Indeed it was, a nice plump little cottontail, and I’ve seen very few days when I was so prosperous that I wouldn’t give a cottontail a run. I wheeled around and went after him.

As I closed the gap on him, he just stood there like a little statue, the way a cottontail will do when he thinks he’s invisible in the grass. That was just fine. I took two final jumps, leaped through the air, and landed right in the middle of him.

I lifted one paw and he wasn’t there. I lifted the other paw and he wasn’t there again. Hmm. I glanced around and saw him about five feet to the north, sitting as stiff as a post with his ears pointed up.

Okay, he wanted to be clever, I could be clever too. I stood up and shook my head—that was to throw him off, see, make him think I was confused. Then I sat down and scratched my ear, but as you may have already guessed, I watched him out of the corner of my eye. It was all part of my clever plan.

But you know what? Once I got to scratching on that ear, it felt so good I didn’t want to quit. I found a spot there that probably hadn’t been scratched in years, and I just can’t describe how good it felt.

First I scratched it real hard. Then I kind of leaned my head into my paw and rubbed it from both ends. It sent delicious tingling sensations down my back and out to the end of my tail, felt so derned good that my eyes started drooping.

It’s funny. All his life a guy looks for happiness and contentment. He looks for it in his work and his love life, and he tends to overlook the little things, like scratching a certain spot just above his ear.

Well, I scratched and I rubbed, and I rubbed and I scratched, and my eyelids drooped and I relaxed all over, and after a while I just kind of melted—fell over backwards, you might say. I lay there for a long time, looking up at the puffy white clouds and blinking my eyes.

Then I jumped up and shook the grass off my coat and . . . HUH? My head snapped around, just in time to see that sniveling little cottontail hop into one of the pipes in the cattleguard. In other words, I had wasted more time and burned more daylight, fooling around with a dadgum rabbit.

I headed for the machine shed. In this business, you’ve got to be alert all the time. You’ve got to concentrate on your objective and shut the little distractions out of your mind, because no matter how you look at it, the little things in this life are still little, and it takes a special kind of dog . . . never mind.

Before I reached headquarters, I had already reviewed the case in my mind. Last night: one murder. This morning: a second murder. Suspects: zero. Clues: none. Overall status of case in pro­g­ress: not so good.

I won’t say that my whole career was riding on this case, because after all, I had enjoyed a rather glorious career and had solved many mysteries. But if I didn’t break this case pretty quick, it wouldn’t look good.

I slowed down and coasted up to the machine shed. High Loper and Drover were standing in the door, and I went over to them. When Loper saw me coming, he narrowed his eyes and said, “Here he comes now.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

He told us to sit down and he went into the machine shed. While he was gone, I turned to Drover. “What’s up?”

He looked up and squinted at the sky. “Well . . .”

“What’s Loper got on his mind?”

“Oh. Oh-h-h Hank, he found the feathers down by the creek and he knows about the chicken murders!”

That was a piece of bad news. I had hoped to have the case wrapped up before he found out about it.

Just then, Loper came out of the machine shed. He had a brown paper bag in his hand and a very unfriendly expression on his face. He glared down at us and rocked up and down on his toes. Drover was so nervous, he tried to hide behind Loper’s leg.

Loper opened up the bag and pulled out a handful of feathers. He held them out for us to smell. I smelled. Drover ducked his head, squirmed around in a circle, and wagged his stub tail. Drover gets very uncomfortable when he can’t run to the machine shed and hide from life’s tribulations.

“Somebody’s been killing chickens around here,” said Loper. “I don’t know who did it. Maybe it was coons. Maybe it was a skunk. Maybe it was coyotes. I don’t know, but I want you dogs to put a stop to it, you hear?”

I whapped my tail against the ground. Drover rolled on his back and held his paws up in the beg position.

“Of course,” Loper shifted his chewing tobacco over to the other cheek, “there’s one other possibility.” He looked at me and I whapped my tail. “Sometimes dogs turn to chicken-killing.”

Well, that was news to me. I’d never heard of such a thing.

“And do you know what happens to chicken-killing dogs?” I looked away and whapped my tail. “They have to be shot. There’s no other cure. Once a dog gets the taste of chicken, it makes him a little crazy.”

It suddenly occurred to me that Drover was acting “a little crazy.” I mean, he was oozing guilt. Was it possible . . . could it be that . . . I couldn’t bring myself to put the pieces of the puzzle together and follow the logic to this conclusion. It was just too awful. And yet . . . 

Why was he rolling around that way? Why did he have that silly grin on his face? And come to think of it, where had he been when the murders had been discovered?

As I studied the little mutt, my heart sank. I’ve said before that to be in the security business, you have to be made from a special kind of steel, but nothing I’d ever done in my career had prepared me for this.

Loper stuffed the feathers back into the sack, shook it in my face and then shook it in Drover’s. “No more chicken killing on this ranch or somebody’s head is going to roll, you got that?” He stormed back into the machine shed and left us alone.

We got away from there, went down to the gas tanks. Drover was still trembling all over. “Boy, that was scary! I sure hope we don’t lose any more chickens.”

I studied him out of the corner of my eye. He was still behaving in a strange manner. “How come you got so nervous up there, Drover?”

“Well, gosh, Loper was mad and . . .”

“Yes, but if you didn’t do anything wrong, why should you get so antsy about it? You weren’t by any chance feeling guilty, were you?”

“Well . . . maybe I was.”

“I see.” I began pacing. “And why were you feeling guilty, Drover? Just tell me in your own words.”

“My own words. Okay. Let’s see. Guilty. I don’t know.”

“Are those your own words?”

“I think so.”

“Then think a little deeper. Why were you feeling guilty about something you didn’t do?”

He rolled his eyes and twisted his head to one side. “Well, I always feel guilty, Hank. Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is feel guilty.”

“There must be a reason for it.”

“Well . . . I mess up a lot. Do you suppose that could be it?”

“I’ll ask the questions. You give the answers.”

“Oh. All right.”

I waited and waited. Nothing. “Well?”

“Sure turned out to be a pretty day, didn’t it?”

I paced over in front of him. “You’re being slippery, Drover, but I’m afraid that won’t wash. I’ll ask you again. Why do you feel guilty every morning when you wake up?”

“Well . . . I think of all the things I can mess up during the day and . . .”

“Yes? Go on.”

“. . . and it makes me feel awful. Then when I mess up for real, I don’t have to worry about it.” He looked at me with a simple grin on his mouth, as though he had just said something wonderful.

I stopped pacing and went nose-to-nose with the runt. “That makes no sense at all, and furthermore, it has nothing to do with The Case of the Vanishing Chickens.”

“Oh.”

“I want to know why you were acting so guilty when Loper was talking about the murders.”

“Well . . .”

I sensed that I was very close to a confession. It was time to bore in with my toughest questions and break down his resistance. I had a suspicion that three or four questions would wrap the case up.

“Is it possible, Drover, that there’s a side to your personality we don’t know about? That on very short notice, you can change from being a simple buffoon into a chicken killer? That you have a secret craving for chicken meat? And finally . . . what are you staring at?”

“You’ve got four little circles of hair sticking up on your back.”

“What?” I bent my neck around and looked at my back. Sure enough, I saw four little circles of hair sticking up. “Oh. That’s where the horses bit me. I was attacked by the entire horse herd a while ago.”

“Oh my gosh!”

“I was working traffic, barked a pickup into the horse pasture, and the horses jumped me. If you’d been up there helping me, it never would have happened.”

“Oh gosh.”

“But you were hiding in the machine shed . . .”

His head began to sink. “Yes.”

“. . . after you saw Sally May coming down to the garden.”

He began to cry. “It’s true.”

“You ran to save your own skin and left me alone.”

“Yes!”

“And you cowered in the machine shed while I was being mauled by thirteen dog-eating horses!”

“Yes, I did, Hank!”

I looked down at him. My questions had re­duced him to jelly. “So you admit your guilt?”

“Yes!” He was bawling now, and the tears were dripping off the end of his nose. “It was all my fault, and I feel so guilty I can hardly stand it!”

Sometimes I’m frightened by my own interrogations. I mean, when a guy can break a suspect down with just a few devastating questions, re­duce him to tears in a matter of minutes—that’s awesome. There’s no other word for it.

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Drover. I hadn’t wanted to give him the full load of devastating questions, but I’d had no choice. I didn’t want to watch him cry, so I walked off a little ways and waited for him to pull himself back together.

I mean, I had won. I could afford to be decent about it. I had gotten a confession out of him and had pretty muchly wrapped up . . . 

HUH? Wait a minute.

I whirled around. “Hey Drover . . .”

He had disappeared.

I had a confession, all right, but a confession of what?