The Case of the Missing Cat Read Free Page B

Three! Two! One! Launch, liftoff, charge, bonzai!!”
    And in a puff of smoke and a cloud of dust, I went streaking toward the target.
    Rabbits are famous for their speed, right? What many people don’t know is that your better grades of cowdog are every bit as fast as a rabbit, and in a few rare cases (me, for example) are even faster.
    I’m not one to boast, but speed was just built into my bloodline.
    In other words, the Lumber-Pile Bunny was in big trouble from the very beginning. I closed in on him fast and was only inches away from snapping him up in my jaws when . . .
    Let’s call it luck. He got lucky, that’s all. And why not? After all, he was carrying around four lucky rabbit’s feet.
    Luck kept him a couple of feet ahead of me as we went streaking out into the home pasture. Inches, actually. We made a wide loop, some 25 yards in front of the corrals, and then I realized that Bunny had changed directions and was high-balling it straight to the lumber pile.
    It was an old rabbit trick. I recognized it right away and took appropriate measures. I went to Incredible Speed and . . . like I said, he was carrying four lucky rabbit’s feet.
    I never denied that rabbits are pretty swift and, okay, maybe he beat me to the lumber pile, but not by much. If the chase had gone another ten feet, I would have nailed him.
    I returned to the gas tanks to wait for him to come out again, as I knew he would. Off to the north, I heard a familiar whiny voice say, “Mmmm, that’s one, Hankie.”
    â€œDon’t worry about it, Kitty, that was just a warm-up.”
    I waited. And waited. The minutes dragged by. Perhaps I dozed. Then . . . the munching of grass reached my ears. He was back, same place. Munching grass right in front of my bedroom. Foolish rabbit.
    Within seconds I had gone through the launch procedure and was back on the chase. You should have seen me! Made that loop out into the pasture and virtually destroyed three acres of good buffalo grass and virtually had that bunny trapped in the deadly vice of my jaws, and if the chase had gone another five feet, that little feller would have been a stasstistic.
    Stasstisstic.
    History.
    Real close race, almost got him, a huge im­provement over the first run, and as long as a guy can see improvement, he knows that he has won a moral victory. And so, with a victory hanging in the trophy room of my mind, I returned, triumphant and victorious, to the gas tanks.

    A little winded, yes, but beneath the huffing and puffing was the warm glow of satisfaction that comes when a dog knows he’s done his job right.
    â€œMmmm, that’s two, Hankie,” said the cat. “Only one shot left.”
    I chuckled and didn’t bother to reply. I knew what the cat was trying to do—put pressure on me so that I would choke. What he didn’t know was that some dogs thrive on pressure, I mean, it’s like throwing gasoline into a . . .
    CHOKE! GASP! ARG!
    On the other hand, I was beginning to feel a small amount of . . . I mean, my job, my position, my entire career was riding on the next . . .
    WHEEZE! ARG! GASP!
    Holy smokes, if I didn’t catch the rabbit on the next run, Pete the Barncat would be the next Head of Ranch Security! Not only would that be a personal disaster for me personally, but it would be disaster for the entire ranch.
    Gulp.
    Pressure. It weighs heavy on the mind, smashes creative impulses, crushes the little flowers of courage that try to bloom in the warm soil of . . . something.
    I was curled up in a ball, in the process of pretending that I was a puppy again, back in the sweet days before I had assumed all the crushing responsibilities of running a ranch, when all of a sudden . . .
    I lifted my eyes and narrowed my head . . . lifted my head and narrowed my eyes, I should say, and there sat the Lumber-Pile Bunny, not ten feet in front of me.
    Okay, this was it. My whole career had come down to this moment, this