Chapter Three: Drover Wasn’t Blown Up

You remember all that business about Drover’s tragic death in an explosion? Ha ha. Just a small error, no big deal, a tiny malfunction in some of our, uh, equipment. I was misquoted, see. I had reported finding small shreds of whitish fuzz, but by the time the story got out, it had been blown completely out of . . .

Okay, here’s the deal. You’ll be shocked and surprised, so grab something solid and hang on. Drover didn’t get blown up, exploded, vaporized, or rendered into doggie hamburger. Do you know why? Because at the first sign of trouble, he slipped away and hid in the machine shed.

I should have known. He does this all the time. He’s such an incredible weenie. I don’t know why I waste time worrying about him. The explosion has never been made that could move fast enough to catch Drover.

So there it is, and by now maybe you’ve figured out that the so-called Mysterious Stranger was actually Mister Slinkaway. How do you suppose that made me feel? It made me feel like an idiot. There I was, standing over his shattered remains and actually feeling sad about it . . .

Never mind. Our best course of action here is to forget the whole shabby affair and pretend that it never happened. In fact, it never happened. Honest. It was just a frigment of our imaginations.

There, we’ve got that out of the way.

Where were we? Oh yes, the pickup. Slim banged and clanged around in the machine shed until he found the big nylon towrope. He dragged it outside and hooked one end to the bumper of the broken pickup. He collected what was left of the air filter, pitched it on top of the motor, and slammed down the hood. By that time, Loper had returned from the house, and I noticed right away that he had done some snipping on his mustache.

Slim noticed too. A little grin tugged at his mouth as he watched Loper coming up the hill. “I think you’re walking straighter now, with all that weight off the left side.” Loper wasn’t smiling. “Well, I tried to warn you.”

“If we did it a thousand times, it would never happen again.”

“Loper, if we did it a thousand times, there wouldn’t be anything left of you but bones and a couple of pieces of meat. You’re just too much of a donkey to admit the truth.”

Loper walked up to him and glared into his eyes. “Am I going to hear about this for the rest of the day?”

“Well, I know all the mechanics in town would love to hear about you starting a pickup the Cowboy Way.” Slim snorted a laugh.

“Slim, how would you like to spend the winter digging sewer lines in the snow?”

There was a long silence. Slim’s smile faded. “As I was saying, my lips are sealed.”

Loper drove his pickup around to the machine shed and they hooked the two pickups together with the towrope. Loper climbed into the lead pickup and Slim headed for the broken one. By the time his hand touched the door handle, Drover and I were right there, poised and ready to spring up into the cab.

See, we’d held a little conference and had decided that, well, it had been a long time since we’d been to town. And we probably needed to go. Or, to frame it up from a different angle, we knew that Slim would want us to go. I mean, who’d want to make a long, lonely trip into town without a couple of crackerjack cowdogs?

He noticed us standing there, poised and quivering with excitement—the excitement that any normal, healthy American dog would feel at the prospect of going to the Big City.

Slim gave us a sour look. “What’s this? You think you deserve to go to town?”

Well . . . yes, sure. Definitely. I mean, we had suffered with him through the Pickup Crisis, right?

“Okay, I’ll let you go, but you’d better behave yourselves.”

Oh, sure. No problem there. We would be Perfect Dogs, no kidding.

When he opened the door, I sprang upward with a mighty surge and . . . BONK . . . hit the steering wheel, you might say, and tumbled backward to the ground. But I leaped to my feet and tried it again, and made a smooth landing on the seat, and you’ll notice that I got there several seconds ahead of Drover. Heh heh. That assured me of getting my favorite spot in the pickup, the Shotgun Position beside the window on the passenger side.

When we were all settled inside the pickup, Slim slammed the door and let his gaze drift over to me. “Did you hit the steering wheel?”

Well, I . . . yes, maybe I did, but was that a big deal? I mean, any dog could have . . .

“Heh. You’ve got to watch out for those steering wheels, pooch. They’ll jump right out in front of you.”

Very funny.

Loper took the slack out of the towrope and we began our slow trip into town. An hour after leaving the ranch, we were driving down the main street of Twitchell, Texas. Wow, what an exciting place! It had everything: cars, people, stores. We passed Waterhole 83, the Dixie Dog Drive-in, Stockman’s Western Wear, two gas stations, the picture show, and a grocery store.

We made a left turn at the stoplight and pulled up in front of Hergert Ford. There, Loper and Slim got out of their respective pickups and went inside to talk to the service manager. Before he left, Slim leaned inside the window and said, “Y’all stay here and be nice. We won’t be long.”

Yes sir! Being nice would be no problem at all. We were just thrilled to be in a huge city like Twitchell, even if we had to stay inside the pickup. What more could a couple of dogs from the country possibly . . .

Just then, a small red pickup pulled into a parking spot nearby. A man stepped out, reached into the bed of the pickup, and brought out a cardboard box. The lettering on the side of the box said TREJO’S DONUT DELIGHTS. He carried the box into the shop and closed the door behind him.

I thought nothing of this at the time, but several minutes later, my noseatory equipment began picking up signals of something . . . hmmm . . . good. Sweet. I gave the air a more thorough sniffing, and by George, the more I sniffed, the more I wanted to find out exactly where that smell was coming from.

I turned to my assistant, who was staring off into deep space. “Drover, may I interrupt for a second?” No response. “Drover? Hello? Is anyone home?”

At last his gaze drifted down and he gave me a silly grin. “Oh, hi. Are you back already?”

“I didn’t go anywhere.”

“Did you see anything exciting?”

“I didn’t go anywhere. I’ve been sitting right here beside you.”

“I’ll be derned. I thought somebody got out and went somewhere.”

“That was Slim.”

“Oh yeah, now I remember. Sometimes I get bored and my mind wanders.”

“No kidding? Drover, I need to ask you a question. Do you smell anything unusual?”

He sniffed the air. “Well, let’s see. Dirty socks?”

“No. That’s just the normal smell of Slim’s pickup. Try again.”

He sniffed. “Oh yeah, I smell it now. Two dogs. Maybe it’s us.”

I struggled for patience. “Drover, please try to be serious. Take a deeper sniff and try to analyze the various odors in the air.”

He drew in a big sniff of air. His eyes popped wide open. “Oh my gosh, there it is!” He darted over to the window, stuck his nose outside, and sniffed some more. “I think it’s coming from that red pickup. And it smells yummy.”

“Exactly. Now we have two snifferations that point to something sweet and yummy. The question now is, what could it be?”

“Yeah. I wonder what it could be.”

“That’s what I just said. At this point, we don’t have any reliable data on that.”

He squinted at the lettering on the door of the red pickup. “Trejo’s Do-nut De-lights. Gosh, I wonder what that means?”

I joined him at the window. “The same message was written on a box the man took inside. Hmm, this is very strange.”

Drover leaned forward and widened his eyes. “Yeah, and you know what? There’s a whole bunch of those boxes in the back of the pickup.”

I took a closer look. “You’re right, Drover, nice work.”

“Thanks.”

“It appears that we’ve stumbled upon boxes and boxes of donuts. The question that faces us now is . . . what is a donut?”

At that very moment, I notice a little gray poodle sitting in the seat of the pickup, with his eyes fixed on the door through which his master had gone. Drover saw him too. “Oh, look, there’s a dog. Maybe he can tell us what a donut is.”

Little did we know or suspect . . . well, you’ll see.