Chapter Eight: The Mysterious Visitor in the Night

In many ways Slim is a fine guy, but a great singer he will never be.

By the time he’d finished the song, darkness had fallen across the canyon and we found ourselves looking up at the black velvet sky, sprayed with thousands of glittering stars.

Slim pointed to the sky and said, “Well, Hank, there’s the Big Dipper.”

Oh really? I studied the sky for a long time and saw nothing but stars.

“And there’s O’Brien the Hunter.”

Okay, some big guy named O’Brien was up there hunting and dipping snuff, and just in case he decided to spit, I moved my business into the tent. It was past my bedtime anyway.

I spent a minute or two digging around on the bedroll, until I had created a spot that was soft enough to hold my freight for the night, and then I collapsed.

It felt wonderful and I fell right off to sleep, and would have stayed asleep through the entire night if Slim hadn’t come blundering into the tent and started accusing me of “hogging” his bedroll.

Hey, who’d gotten there first? Who’d taken the time to dig it up and fluff it up and warm it up? ME. But never mind property law, never mind what was good and right. He bullied his way onto the bedroll and managed to push me off onto the cold hard ground.

I didn’t sleep well on the cold hard ground, and before long I began hearing strange noises coming from Slim’s side of the tent. I sat up and listened. Slim had mentioned something about “hogging.” Now I was hearing sounds that almost surely were coming from hogs. Was there a pattern here?

My goodness, did we have HOGS in the tent with us? Yes, by George, someone or something had turned a bunch of hogs loose inside our tent!

Well, you know me. I’m not the kind of dog who’ll turn over and go to sleep while a herd of wild boars is running loose in the tent, so I did what any Head of Ranch Security would have done: I barked. Boy howdy, did I bark!

Suddenly the oinking stopped. Slim sat up in bed. “Hank, shut up. It’s just me snoring.”

Oh.

“And if you can’t handle that, go sleep outside.”

No, that was fine, no problem. I’d just thought . . . hey, I’d never heard sounds like that coming from a human, I mean, we’re talking about real heavy-duty pig noises.

“Now go to sleep.”

Okay, fine. You never know until you check these things out. I’d done my job and checked it out and . . . boy, that guy made an incredible amount of noise in his sleep. Beat anything I’d ever heard before.

I waited until he started snoring again and then I slipped back and reclaimed my spot on the bedroll. That was much better than the cold hard ground, although I had a little trouble drifting off because his nose kept poking me in the ribs.

I don’t know how long I’d been asleep, but sometime in the middle of the night my ears shot up. I lifted my head and waited for my eyes to stop rolling around.

Unless I was badly mistaken, I’d heard a sound in the distance, and this time it wasn’t Slim’s snoring. No, it sounded more like . . . holy smokes, it sounded like the hum of a pickup motor and the rattling of a stock trailer!

A growl began to form in my throat, then I leaped to my feet and began to bark. Suddenly and out of nowhere, a foot appeared out of nowhere and booted me out of the tent!

“Dadgum barking dog, get out of here!”

Oh, that must have been Slim’s foot and he had . . . but obviously he hadn’t heard what I had heard, and what I had heard just might be a gang of cattle rustlers coming into the pasture.

I mean, that’s why we were camping out in the pasture, right? And it was my job to sound the alarm when I heard strange noises out there in the pasture, right? Okay, that was my job and I had every intention of . . .

SPLAT!

He had just clubbed me with a pillow. Can you believe it? There I was, trying to fulfill the mission that had been assigned to me and . . .

“Dry up, Hank!”

Okay, fine. I could dry up. I could let him sleep his life away, if that’s what he wanted, and I could let the rustlers carry off all of Uncle Johnny’s calf crop too.

What did I care? I hadn’t asked for a combat assignment. I would have been perfectly happy to stay back at headquarters. Did he think that camping out on the hard ground and listening to him snore and eating poisoned weenies was my idea of fun?

Hey, he wanted me to dry up? Fine. He wanted to sleep? Terrific. I could sleep too. I didn’t have to take all his screeching and kicking. I got paid the same whether I caught cattle rustlers or not, so phooey on him and his lousy . . .

But you know what? I tried to sleep but I couldn’t. I tried not to care but I did. I guess that’s one of the marks of a true top-of-the-line blue-ribbon cowdog: we care about things, even when nobody else does, even when there seems to be no reason to care.

Your ordinary dog would have turned over and gone back to sleep, but my ma didn’t raise me to be ordinary. It appeared that I would have to tackle this thing alone, solve the entire case without the help of anyone else, and before I could ponder the consequences of such a bold decision, I left camp in a run and headed out into the deep darkness of the canyon.

If I had stopped to ponder this deal, one of the things I might have pondered about was that I would be traveling alone through a canyon that was known to be infested with cannibals.

That would have been dangerous enough in the light of day, when most cannibals are asleep in their holes, but traveling at night . . .

Gulp. My bold decision was looking worse all the time. I mean, there’s a fine line between bravery and really stupid behavior.

Well, there was nothing to do but mush on and hope for the best.

We had made our camp near the north end of the pasture and the rustlers, if that’s who they were, would be coming through the south gate, about a mile away. How did I know that? Simple, That pasture was so rough, there was only one road in and and one road out.

I must have run a good half-mile when I stopped on a high bluff to catch my breath and reconnoiter the country ahead. Looking south down the canyon, I could see . . . holy cats, the flash of headlights!

Sure enough, somebody was driving around in the pasture. Not only did that give me a creepy feeling, but it proved that I was wearing a very sensitive and high-quality set of ears. I had suspected all along that they were pretty good ears, and this was sure ’nuff proof of it.

Picked up the sound of a stock trailer rattling a whole mile away. Pretty good ears.

And that led naturally into the next question, which I posed aloud to myself. “Okay, Hankie Boy, we’ve got this investigation going in the right direction. What do we do now?”

I was surprised—nay, shocked, astounded, and stupified—when a voice other than my own responded to that question. The voice said, “You know, I’ve been sitting here, axing myself that very same question.”

My mouth suddenly went dry. Was I dreaming this mystery voice in the night? No, I was wide awake. Did that voice belong to Slim? No way. Was there any other voice that I might want to hear in the middle of a pasture in the middle of the night? Absolutely not.

Hence, I reached for the afterburners and . . . WHAM . . . ran into something big, hairy, and immovable—something so big that even the force of my afterburners didn’t make an impression on it. And fellers, that was BIG.

I was in the process of picking myself off the ground and trying to restart my breathing mechanisms, when I heard the thing say, “Oops, sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

Oops? Hadn’t I met someone in recent days who had used that expression? I ran that through my data banks, calling up a search using “Oops” as the key word. The massive mainframe that resides between my ears clicked and whirred, and within seconds it spit out a single name.

“Brewster? Is that you? Please say yes, because if you say no, it will mean that I just ran over a cannibal in the darkness.”

“Yeah, it was me all right, and I’m no camel. Just a dog.”

“Great, oh boy, that’s a relief, but I said cannibal, not camel.”

“Oh. I wondered. Never saw a camel around here.”

“There’s a reason for that, Brewster. We have no camels on this ranch, but unfortunately this pasture is crawling with cannibals.”

“Aw heck. What does a cammibal look like?”

“They look like coyotes, they’re always hungry, and they will eat a ranch dog if given the slightest opportunity. But never mind that. What in the name of thunderation are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

He yawned. “You know, that’s a long story, and I just don’t know whether I have the energy to tell it or not.”

“Make the energy, Brewster, and tell it. It could be very important to this case.”

And with that, I began the long and tedious process of interrogating Brewster the Dog, which proved to be a long and tedious process, but one which yielded some very important information—such as . . .

Well, you’ll see. Just keep reading.