Chapter Four: Attacked by a Huge One-Eyed Robot

They were staring at me, both of them, and grinning. What was the deal? I gave them Sincere Looks and whapped my tail on the cement floor, as if to say, “Sorry, I wasn’t listening and must have missed part of the, uh, conversation.”

I’d heard part of it. Alfred and his dad had been reading some book about a guy who went fishing and . . . ate strawberries . . . huckleberries . . . something about berries, and Slim had been offered a job . . .

To tell you the truth, it hadn’t made much sense to me and . . . why were they grinning at me?

Alfred looked up at Slim. “You think Hank could be Huck?”

“Why shore, why not? ‘Hank’ is pretty close to ‘Huck,’ ain’t it? I mean, you just shuffle a few letters around and you get Huck. And Huck, now, he was about half-lazy and worthless, as I remember, and that sort of fits too, don’t it?”

Alfred thought that over. “Yeah, but in the book, Huck didn’t have a tail.”

“Huh. Hadn’t thought of that. Say, we’ve got a hacksaw up at the machine shed, and I’ll bet we could fix that tail business.”

What? Fix my tail with a hacksaw, is that what he’d said? I searched their faces for some hint of what was going on here and . . . okay, they both laughed, so it appeared that this was some more of Slim’s cowboy humor.

Around here, you never know for sure. I mean, just when you think he’s kidding, you find out that it’s a nutty idea and he’s serious about it.

But this time he was kidding. I was glad.

Slim got his chuckle out of it and continued. “Heck, it don’t matter that he has a tail. It’s all pretend anyway. Now.” He hitched up his jeans. “If y’all will excuse me, I need to start my day and get some work done. Some of us have to work for a living, you know.”

Why did he glance at me when he said that? It was a cheap shot, another lame attempt at humor. He thinks he’s such a comedian. Sometimes . . . just skip it.

Alfred and I followed him outside. He closed the saddle shed door, then opened a corral gate so that the heifer and her new calf could go out into the pasture. Then the three of us hiked up the hill to the machine shed. Slim stopped in front of the shed and gave us a stern glare.

“Now listen, you two. I’ve got to do some welding to stay ahead of all the hay equipment your daddy tears up in a normal day. When I get under that welding hood and start burnin’ sticks, y’all don’t look at the fire, hear? It’ll blister your eyes.”

Alfred nodded. “Okay, Swim.”

“And don’t be getting into any mischief.”

“Okay, Swim. We’ll be so good, you’ll think we’re angels from heaven.”

Slim’s gaze went from me to Alfred and back to me. He shook his head. “Huh. Somehow I ain’t convinced, but I guess we can give it a try.”

He pushed open the big sliding doors and we all went inside. Slim gathered up some tools and equipment, and turned on the welder whilst Alfred and I found places to sit nearby. Just for a moment or two I was distracted by a flea on my right hind leg, and when I looked up again I saw . . .

HUH?

You won’t believe this. Slim had vanished, and in his place there stood this . . . this . . . this HUGE ONE-EYED ROBOT. Honest. I’m not kidding. And it had the scariest face you ever saw—no ears, no nose, no wrinkles or expression, and one big eye in the shape of a box or a rectangle. It stretched across the upper part of his face, the eye did, and it was very dark, almost black.

Scariest thing I’d ever seen.

Well, you know me. When I’m confronted by robots and monsters, I don’t just sit there looking simple. I bark. Yes sir, and that’s just what I did. I leaped to my feet, bristled the hair on my back, and launched myself into a withering barrage of barking.

Oh, and did I mention the ray gun in his right hand? Yes sir, he held some kind of deadly ray gun in his hand, and it was attached to a long black cord.

I didn’t know who that guy was or what he was doing on our ranch, but I took no chances. I gave him the Full Load of barking, and also began edging towards the door. I had never gone up against a robot as big as this one. I’ll bet he stood six feet tall.

Seven feet. The biggest, scariest robot I’d ever seen.

Well, I barked at him for a whole minute, I mean, one bark right after another, and it should have scared him away. But it didn’t. You know what he did?

Hang on. This gets real scary.

He turned around very slowly and stared at me with that . . . that wicked black eye. The barking died in my throat. I froze and felt the hair rising on the back of my neck. Then . . .

Are you sure you ought to hear the rest of this? Don’t even try it unless you’ve had some experience with robots and monsters.

Okay, there we were. He was staring at me with his horrible robot eye and I was frozen in my tracks, waiting to see what would happen next. What happened next was that he raised his hands up to the level of his head, made claws with them, and started slouching towards me.

Oh, and he growled too, a deep ferocious growl.

Hey, that was all I needed to know about robots. THEY ATE DOGS!

I went to Full Power on all engines, spun all four paws on the cement floor, and got the heck out of there. Once I had cleared the door, I dared to fire a bark over my shoulder, just in case he might be . . .

Where was Little Alfred? I screeched to a stop. Holy smokes, the boy was trapped inside the machine shed with that bloodthirsty . . .

Huh? Laughter? I cocked my ears and listened. Unless I was badly mistaken, someone inside the machine shed . . . several someones inside the machine shed were . . . laughing. That made no sense. I mean, this was a very serious deal, so why would . . .

Did I dare creep back to the door and peek inside? It would be dangerous, but I had to do it. I had to check on the boy. For all I knew, that robot monster had tied him up and was now . . . well, tickling him or something. That would account for his laughter, see.

Yes, I had to know the awful truth, so I forced myself to creep back to the door. My entire body was as tense as a coiled spring, the enormous muscles in my shoulders drawn as tight as bands of steel. Closer and closer I crept. I poked my head through the doors and saw . . .

Okay, false alarm, relax. It was another of Slim’s stupid . . .

He was welding, right? And you probably didn’t know that when people weld, they wear a black plastic hood, called a . . . well, a welding hood, of course. It has a slit of smoked glass that looks very much like a monster eye, see, and any dog who had seen . . .

Oh, he got big yuks out of this. He flipped up the hood and pointed to his face and said, “It’s only me, you dufus dog.”

Hey, I’d known it was him all along. He hadn’t fooled . . .

He thinks he’s so funny, but he’s not, not funny at all. I don’t know why I put up with his . . .

Skip it.

Holding my head at a proud angle, I marched back into this so-called “workplace,” which had been transformed into the scene of Slim’s childish follyrot. I went straight over to my pal Alfred and gave him Looks of Embarrassment and Slow Wags on the tail section. It saddened me to see that he too was laughing.

“Did you think he was a monstoo, Hankie?”

No. Well, not for long. Could we move along to something else?

At last Slim’s laughter faded away and he ran out of excuses to loaf and torment innocent dogs. At that point he lowered his welding hood and was forced to go to work. I know it must have broken his heart.

He’s such a goof-off. And can you believe he’d called ME a “dufus dog”? Ha.

All at once the air was filled with sparks and smoke and the crackle of burning metal. Alfred and I sat there for a long time, concentrating extra hard on being perfect children and dogs. It turned out to be pretty boring, actually, and after ten minutes of it, the boy got up and started prowling around.

He played with some tools for a while, then he spied the ground clamp on the piece of metal Slim was welding. Welding on. The piece of metal on which he was . . . phooey.

There’s this thing called a “ground lead.” It’s a thick black wire with a clamp on the end. When guys weld, they have to clamp the clamp on the piece of metal they’re welding. Why? I have no idea, but I know that if you unhook the clamp, the welder quits working.

And that’s what Alfred did. He unhooked the clamp and hooked it up to a pipe wrench that was lying on the floor. And all at once, the air was no longer filled with smoke and sparks and the crackle of burning metal. The welder quit.

In the silence we heard Slim scratching the welding rod over the piece of metal. The scratching grew louder and more vigorous. Then he leaped up and raised the hood.

“This dadgum two-bit crackerbox piece of junk! I told Loper to buy us a decent welder. How can I fix all the stuff he tears up when he won’t . . .” The rest of what he said was lost in a fog of mumbles and mutters.

He stomped over to the welder and flicked the switch off and on several times. He leaned down and listened to the hum. He twisted several dials. Then he kicked it.

“Pig nose. Probably got a short. A mouse probably chewed a . . .” It was then that his eyes fell upon the ground lead, which was clamped to the Stilson wrench. His gaze moved slowly across the room and landed on Alfred, like a cat pouncing on a mouse. “Did you do that?”

The boy was looking up at the ceiling. “Do what, Swim?”

“Uh-huh. I think it’s time for y’all to move along.”

“I was twying to help, Swim.”

Slim took the boy by the ear and led him to the door. “Trying and helping ain’t the same, son, and an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.”

“Aw, Swim, what’ll we do?”

“Go play Tom Sawyer. Go get the mail. Go dig a hole. But the main thing is GO.”

“What about my dog?”

“Let not your heart be troubled, he’s next on the list to leave.” Slim came back into the shop. He drilled me with a hot glare and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “All right, bozo, the fun part’s over. Scram.”

Fine. I’d been about ready to leave anyway. Too much noise and smoke.

I gathered myself up, made a wide path around Slim the Robot, and plunged outside into the fresh air and sunshine.

Little did I know or suspect what lay ahead. It wasn’t good.