Moonlight Madness. John R. Erickson

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Have we ever discussed the time when Sally May invited her Sunday school class out to the ranch for a picnic?

      Maybe not, but we should. It was a pretty strange day.

      And did I mention Eddy the Rac? Maybe not. Well, he was a pretty interesting guy and he appeared on the ranch about this same time, just a couple of days before Sally May’s picnic.

      But maybe we ought to start at the beginning. That’s the very best place to start a story, at the beginning.

      Okay, let’s get organized.

      It was Monday, as I recall, and it was also July. How could one day be both Monday and July? I don’t know, but it was, and Slim and Loper had spent the morning loading and stacking bales of hay in the . . . well, in the hay field, of course. Where else would you load and stack hay?

      They had been hauling hay and they were tired and sweaty and they had come to the house for lunch, only lunch wasn’t quite ready. You see, Sally May had spent part of the morning talking on the phone. So the boys got out their ropes and started playing a game of Horse.

      Have you ever played Horse with ropes and a roping dummy? I haven’t, but I’ve watched it several times. They’ve got this roping dummy, see, which is made out of scrap lumber. It has a kind of head with horns and two front legs made of two-by-fours, but the funny part is that it has only ONE back leg.

      That’s correct, one back leg right in the middle, and Slim and Loper practiced their roping by tossing loops at the dummy. If one guy makes a catch, the second guy has to make the same catch. If he doesn’t, he gets one letter from the word “horse.” The first one to spell out the whole word loses the game.

      I agree, it’s a pretty silly thing for two grown men to be doing, and it looks even sillier when their roping dummy has only three legs.

      Think about it. The roping dummy is supposed to represent a calf, right? Would you care to guess how many tripod calves we have on this ranch? None. Zero. There are no three-legged calves on this outfit.

      So why does their roping dummy have only three legs? I have my theories.

      Theory #1: When they were building the dummy, they ran out of scrap lumber and weren’t able to finish the job right. Instead of going to the lumber yard and investing five bucks on some good lumber, they chose the Path of Leased Resistance and built a dummy that was a freak of nature.

      Theory #2: When they were building the dummy, they had plenty of lumber but ran out of ambition. Perhaps the day was too hot or too cold. Perhaps their carpentry skills had been strained to the breaking point.

      But for whatever reason, they figgered out that two back legs would take twice as long to build as one leg, so they cobbled up a three-legged roping dummy and justified it by saying, “Close enough for cowboy work.”

      You can guess which theory I’d choose. Number Two. It sounds just like those guys. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. They’ll start a project that requires time and patience, and halfway through they begin to “short out,” so to speak. They get tired. They get bored. They start talking about all the other work that needs to be done.

      And that’s where three-legged roping dummies come from.

      Now, if I was running this ranch . . . but we needn’t get started on that subject. Nobody pays any attention to the Head of Ranch Security.

      All they expect out of us is that we put in eighteen or twenty hours of work every day, with no comments or complaints or questions. After you’ve done that for ten or fifteen years, then they still won’t listen to you.

      Anyways, they had dragged up their freakish three-legged roping dummy and were in the middle of a hot game of Horse. Loper had been making some pretty fancy hoolihan throws and Slim was behind with a score of H-O . . .

      Just then, Sally May came out the back door. And when the screen door slammed, guess who suddenly appeared and came sprinting out of the iris patch—which, by the way, was supposed to be off-limits to ALL animals on the ranch.

      Pete the Cheat.

      Mister Greedy.

      Mister Scrap Chaser.

      Mister Never Satisfied with What He’s Given.

      Mister Always Wants Another Handout.

      He spends most of his life loafing and lurking in the flower beds, don’t you see, just waiting for Sally May to come out the back door with a plate of scraps.

      The rest of us have jobs. We have to work for a living. Not Pete. He’s a full-time moocher and he lives for the moment when Sally May comes out the back door with table scraps.

      Okay,