The phantom in the mirro.., p.1
The Phantom in the Mirror, page 1
The Phantom in the Mirror
John R. Erickson
Illustrations by Gerald L. Holmes
Maverick Books, Inc.
Publication Information
MAVERICK BOOKS
Published by Maverick Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 549, Perryton, TX 79070
Phone: 806.435.7611
www.hankthecowdog.com
First published in the United States of America by Gulf Publishing Company, 1993.
Subsequently published simultaneously by Viking Children’s Books and Puffin Books, members of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1999.
Currently published by Maverick Books, Inc., 2013.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © John R. Erickson, 1993
All rights reserved
Maverick Books, Inc. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59188-120-9
Hank the Cowdog® is a registered trademark of John R. Erickson.
Printed in the United States of America
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Dedication
This one’s dedicated to Lisa Rinker. Welcome to the world.
Contents
Chapter One Who’s Freddie?
Chapter Two A Try It Again
Chapter Three The Phantom Dog in the Mirror
Chapter Four I Ignore Pete’s Stupid Story
Chapter Five Okay, Maybe Pete’s Story Wasn’t So Stupid
Chapter Six Something Lurking in the Weeds
Chapter Seven J.T.’s Shocking Revelation
Chapter Eight Fishing Turns Out to Be No Fun for Me
Chapter Nine One Thing Leads to Another
Chapter Ten An Important Mission for Drover
Chapter Eleven The Dog Food Thief
Chapter Twelve I Save the Party and Sally May Loves Me Again
Chapter One: Who’s Freddie?
It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It was early December as I recall, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It appeared to be a normal, ordinary day. At 7:05 I began my Barking Up the Sun procedure, and by 7:27 I had that job pretty well under . . .
Have we discussed the vicious rumors that have been circulating around the ranch lately? Maybe not. It seems that J. T. Cluck, the head rooster, has been whispering it around that HE is the one who causes the sun to rise.
The way he tells it, the sun wouldn’t come up if it weren’t for all the noise he makes in the morning—crowing, I suppose you’d call it—but there’s absolutely no truth to his story.
Any sun that paid attention to a noisy rooster would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it? No, it takes more than a few squawks from a rooster to get the sun over the horizon. It takes the kind of deep and serious barking that comes from a Head of Ranch Security.
Anyway, it appeared that we had a normal day started . . . well, not really, come to think of it, because that was the morning I checked out a stray dog report.
Yes, that turned out to be a pretty exciting little episode but I don’t think we have time for it here. I mean, we’ve got the whole Skunk Mystery before us, and then there’s the part about the Phantom in the Mirror.
You ever run into the Phantom Dog? One of the scariest characters I ever encountered in my whole career.
Anyways, I was out there on Life’s front lines, trying to bark up the sun, when all at once I noticed an echo. My barks were coming back to me, and that was odd. It had never happened before.
After a few minutes of this, it occurred to me that what I was hearing might not be an echo at all, but rather the sound of another dog barking.
Well, you know me. If there’s a stray dog on my ranch, I want to know: A) who he is; B) exactly what he thinks he’s doing on my outfit; C) who gave him permission to be there; and D) how soon he can leave.
Hence, once I had the sun pretty well barked up, I went swaggering out into the semidarkness to lay down the law to this trespasser.
“Hey, you! Who are you, and what do you think you’re doing on my ranch? And by the way, I’m Head of Ranch Security, just in case you didn’t know.”
I stopped and listened. That’s when I heard his reply: “Uh! Name Freddie and want make talk with ranch dog.”
Hmmm. There was something familiar about the voice, yet when I ran “Freddie” through my data banks, I came up with nothing. According to my records, we had never had a “Freddie” on the ranch at any time.
I decided to probe the matter a little deeper. “Freddie, you’re not in our files, which means you’re not authorized to be on this outfit. If you’re lost, maybe I can give you directions off the ranch, but for your own safety, I must warn you not to proceed any closer to the house.”
“How come not closer to house?”
“Because, Freddie, this ranch is protected by one of the most sophisticated defense systems in the entire world. Get too close and the system kicks into Defend-the-House Mode, and once that happens, pal, I can’t be responsible for your safety.”
“Uh! Sound pretty stupid to me.”
“Oh yeah? Hey, Freddie, take my advice and leave while you can still walk. The last mutt who trespassed on my place had to be scraped off two acres of sagebrush and carried away in a sardine can. I mean, that was all that was left of him. We’re talking about serious consequences.”
“Uh! Take ‘cereal consequences’ and stuff in left ear! Freddie not scared even a little bit.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Who was this guy, anyway? Whoever he was, he couldn’t be very smart, and it appeared that I would have to contribute a little bit to his education, so to speak.
I mean, I don’t go around looking for fights, but when stray dogs start mouthing off to me on MY ranch . . . hey, that’s all it takes to start a riot.
“Listen, pal, it’s clear to me you don’t realize to who or whom you’re speaking, so I’m going to give you one last chance. Get off the ranch and we’ll drop all charges, write it off as a mistake, and forget that it ever happened. That’s as good a deal as you’re going to get out of me.”
“Ha! Ranch dog full of baloney!”
HUH?
The hair on my back shot up. My ears shot up. My lips shot up, revealing deadly white fangs. A growl began rumbling in my throat.
“Hey Freddie, did you just say what I thought you said?”
“Freddie say ranch dog full of baloney! And salami and prunes and brussels sprouts, ho ho!”
That did it. I might have overlooked the baloney but not the prunes and brussels sprouts. I lumbered out to teach this Freddie a lesson he wouldn’t forget.
“Hey Freddie, I’m feeling generous this morning. Do you want to learn your lessons through normal pasture fighting or would you rather get an exhibition of dog-karate? I’m a black belt in both, by the way.”
“Ha! Freddie feed ranch dog karate for breakfast!”
“Keep talking, guy. You’re digging your own tombstone, and the more you talk, the deeper it gets.”
You know what the mutt did then? He belched, real loud.
“Yeah? Well, some dogs learn easy, some dogs learn hard, and some dogs don’t live long enough to learn much of anything.”
“Yuck yuck! Momma of ranch dog big, fat, and ugly. Have wart on nose, wear gunnysack underpants.”
I rolled my eyes on that one. This guy was really desperate for something to say. He must have been scared stiff.
Piecing together the bits of information at my disposal, I pulled up a profile of the little fraud. He had to be one of the pipsqueak breeds—poodle, terrier, Chihuahua. It’s common knowledge that your pipsqueak breeds tend to be short of stature and long on mouth.
It’s called The Little Dog Complex, if you want to get into the technical side. We’ve worked up personality profiles of all the different breeds, see, and we run into Little Dog Complex quite often.
In a classic case of LDC, you have a shriveled up, quivering, lickspittle runt of a dog who tries to do with his mouth what he can’t do with the rest of his body. You can spot ’em right away and you don’t even have to see ’em.
They all talk trash, and the trashier the talk, the smaller the dog.
This Freddie fit the LDC profile. I mean, he was a classic case right down the line. I was positive that, when I crossed the last little hill between us and looked down the other side, I would see . . .
HUH?
You know, one of the things that makes coyotes particularly dangerous characters—I mean, aside from the fact that they are cannibals and have been known to eat ranch dogs—one of the things that makes coyotes particularly dangerous enemies is that they can BARK just like a normal dog.
You wouldn’t expect a cannibal to bark, would you? I mean, they’re best known for their howling, right? That’s what coyotes are supposed to do, howl.
But they’re also famous for cheating, and one of their favorite cheating tricks is to bark like a dog. They do this to lure an unsuspecting ranch dog away from the house, don’t
So it was no disgrace, no big deal that I . . . that our equipment came up with faulty profiles and so forth and . . . hey, they were CHEATING, don’t forget that.
Okay. You’ll never guess who I found waiting on the other side of that little hill. It wasn’t a loudmouthed little poodle, as you might have suspected, but Rip and Snort, the cannibal brothers.
They had lured me into an ambush, see, by cheating and lying and using cheap tricks, and by the time I figgered it out, they had already . . .
We needn’t go into every detail. I, uh, gave them the whipping they deserved and hurried back to headquarters to, uh, finish up my morning chores.
I still had a lot of work to do.
There just wasn’t time in my busy schedule for fighting and brawling and such childish things.
Hey, I’m a very busy dog and . . . never mind.
Let’s just say that too many cannibals in the morning can ruin your day.
Chapter Two: Try It Again
Can we start all over?
It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. It was a normal day on the ranch, early December, as I recall. After barking the sun over the horizon, I went straight back to headquarters and saw no stray dogs or anything else out of the ordinary.
No fights, no scuffles, no violence of any kind. It was just a totally normal day, and at that point I was ready to launch my investigation into the Phantom Dog Mystery.
Maybe you’re not familiar with Phantom Dogs, so let me pause here to . . .
All right, maybe I’m withholding a few shreds of information and taking a few liberties with the truth, but who wouldn’t? Let’s face it, getting suckered into a fight with two coyotes isn’t something that most dogs can be proud of. It makes us look bad.
It’s embarrassing.
Humiliating.
A humbling experience.
Who wants to be humble? Not me. Humble is what cats are supposed to be, whereas your better breeds of cowdog . . .
Okay, I’ll tell you the straight story if you’ll promise never ever to repeat it, and I mean NEVER EVER. If word of this ever got into the wrong hands . . . ears, I guess . . . if word of this ever got out amongst the crinimals of the underworld, it could have very serious consequences.
Have you sworn yourself to silence with a solemn oath? If not, you’re not allowed to finish this story. Put your book away this very minute and go . . . I don’t know what you should do . . . go sit in the corner and count to 50,000.
The main thing is, be quiet and don’t peek or listen to the following Highly Classified Information.
All clear?
Those two coyotes thrashed me badly. I mean, we’re talking about walking into a couple of buzz saws running at top speed. They not only thrashed me, but they made it look easy and had a great time doing it.
They may have used cheap tricks to lure me out there, but there was nothing cheap about the whipping they passed out. It was the best whipping money could buy.
Fellers, I got romped and stomped in so many different ways, I ran out of toes to count ’em. As I’ve said before, when it comes to tough, Rip and Snort are the champs of the world.
Somehow I managed to escape. How? Good question. Maybe they got bored, shooting baskets with me, but somehow I managed to escape their clutches and once that happened, we had Rocket Dog streaking back to the house—I mean, a cloud of dust and a puff of smoke.
I knew they wouldn’t follow me up into the yard. They’d never been that brazen and bold before. They’d always chased me, oh, to the shelter belt and then turned back.
They chased me past the shelter belt, through the front gate, around the house, through Sally May’s precious yard, out the back gate, and YIKES, they were still after me!
They’d never done that before. This was something entirely new, and where does a dog go when the cannibals chase him right to the house and through the yard, and where were Loper and his shotgun when I really needed them?
My original plan had been to lose the coyotes up at the shelter belt, don’t you see, and then return to my gunnysack bed under the gas tanks, there to wake up Drover and tell him of my morning adventures.
Instead, I went streaking past the gas tanks and yelled, “Hey Drover, would you come out here for a second, I need to tell you something!”
I felt it my duty to inform him that the ranch was under attack, don’t you see, and . . . well, the thought did occur to me that his appearance on the scene might provide a, shall we say, diversionary tactic that might . . .
It didn’t work. As I streaked past, he raised his head and muttered, “Murgle skiffer porkchop skittle ricky tattoo.”
The coyotes didn’t see him or weren’t interested in eating him for breakfast, and the chase went on—back up the hill, through the front gate, through Sally May’s precious yard, and things were looking pretty grim for the Head of Ranch Security, when all at once and thank goodness, Loper stepped out on the porch.
It appeared that he had come out to hang a Christmas wreath on the door, and in a matter of seconds I had taken refuge behind and between his legs.
That kind of surprised him. “Hank, what in the . . .” And then he saw the cannibals. “Hyah, go on, get out of here!”
Well, they wanted none of Loper, even without his shotgun, and they pointed themselves east and set sail. At that point I ventured a step beyond Loper’s legs and cut loose with a withering barrage of barking.
“That’s right, and if you ever come into this yard again, I’ll give you the other half of what I did to you out in the pasture! And you didn’t fool me for a minute with that Freddie business.”
I went all the way to the edge of the porch and barked until the cowards disappeared over that first hill east of the house, and then I barked some more, just to be sure they got the message.
(By the way, we’ve come to the end of the Secret and Classified Information. In a matter of seconds, the pages containing this highly sensitive information will hiss, sizzle, smoke, and disappear before your very eyes. Please stand back during this procedure).
HISS! SIZZLE!
SMOKE!
SELF-DESTRUCT PROCEDURE IS COMPLETED PASSAGE HAS BEEN DELETED FROM MEMORY
Okay, where were we? Standing on the porch.
Loper whistled under his breath. “My gosh, that’s the first time I ever saw coyotes come right up in the yard. They must be operating on short rations. Did you give ’em a pretty good whupping, Hankie boy?”
I . . . uh . . . yes. A good whupping had indeed occurred.
In other words, yes.
I’d given them the thrashing they so richly deserved, and even though it had appeared there for a moment that they’d gotten the upper hand, they’d actually gotten the, uh, lower hand.
They were lucky to have escaped with their lives, and next time, if they were foolish enough to try it again, next time they might not be so lucky.
I barked them one last time, just to give emphasis to my warning.
Loper grinned and scratched me on top of the head. “Pooch, it looks like you got a Mohawk haircut all the way from your ears to the end of your tail.”
He was referring to the strip of raised hair on my back. In some quarters it has been said—incorrectly, as you’ll see—it has been said that these so-called “raised hackles” reveal that a dog has just been scared beyond recognition.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Those reports are based on gossip, faulty research, and misquotations. Raised hackles and hair standing on end have nothing whatsoever to do with fear.
Rather, they are part of a dog’s natural defense against, uh, severe cold.
Chill.
Loss of body heat.
Hypothermometer, it’s called.
Don’t forget, this incident occurred in December, and it can be very cold in the Texas Panhandle in December, especially in the early morning hours.
Extremely cold.
