The Case of the Black-Hooded Hangmans. John R. Erickson

      It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Do you remember Eddy the raccoon? We called him Eddy the Rac for short, and he caused nothing but trouble from the first day he arrived on the ranch.

      He was an orphan, see. His ma got run over on the county road. Slim the Cowboy found him up in a tree and took him home to raise.

      I knew that was a bad idea. I could have told ’em but nobody asked my opinion. Who am I, after all? I’m merely the Head of Ranch Security, the guy who runs this ranch day after day and night after night, the guy who puts his life on the line to protect it from monsters and so forth.

      And from coons, who are very destructive. If you want the inside story on coons, ask a Head of Ranch Security. If not for us, the coons would have taken over years ago. They would have stolen all the feed out of the feed barn, all the machines out of the machine shed, and all the corn out of the corn patch.

      Oh yes, and all the eggs out of the chicken house, but that happens to be a sensitive subject and I’m not sure I want to talk about it.

      Yes, I’d had lots of experience in dealing with Eddy’s kinfolks, and I knew for a fact that coons weren’t nice guys. But what was I supposed to do when Slim brought Eddy home and decided to make a pet of him?

      All at once we had this little con artist on the place and I had strict orders to be nice to him. Okay, so I went out of my way to be nice to him. What did it get me? You’ll see.

      But I’ll give you a little hint. It was Eddy who led us to the Haunted House which happened to be full of . . . I don’t want to scare anybody, so hang on.

      Maybe I shouldn’t even mention it. It’s too scary.

      Oh, maybe you can handle it. We’ll give it a shot. It was full of BLACK-HOODED HANGMANS! Pretty scary, huh? I warned you.

      Anyways, where were we? I guess it was in the winter, late January or early February. It was cold and snowy. Gloomy weather. Eddy had been living with us for several months, as I recall, and had broken all records for making mischief.

      See, he had a real talent for thinking up mischief and luring me into his schemes. Then, after the mischief was done, he would disappear, and guess who always got caught. And blamed. And yelled at and scolded.

      Me.

      Well, you can fool Hank the Cowdog once in a row and you can also fool him twice in a row, if you’re pretty clever, and sometimes even four or five times in a row.

      Maybe that’s hard for you to believe, that a rinky-dink little raccoon could fool the Head of Ranch Security many times in a row. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but he did. I admit it.

      But let me hasten to add that I had learned valuable lessons on the subject of coons:

      1. Never believe anything a coon tells you.

      2. Never take advice from one.

      3. And above all, never ever help one escape from his cage in the middle of the night.

      Yes, I had been to school on coons, and the experience had made me a stronger, wiser, more mature dog. The chances that I would ever be fooled again by a raccoon had shrunk down to zero, or below zero.

      All right, so it was a brittle cold evening toward the end of January. Eddy the Rac was camped in his cage in front of the machine shed, and as I recall, he was asleep.

      Yes, of course he was because that’s typical coon behavior. They fall asleep around six o’clock in the evening, and then when everybody else is ready to hit the gunnysack, they’re wide awake and ready to play.

      Eddy was racked out. A little play on words there. Get it? Eddy the Rac was racked out, which means asleep. Pretty good, huh? I get a kick out of . . .

      What was I talking about? Oh yes, cornbread. Sally May had pitched out a few slices of week-old cornbread with the evening scraps. Drover and I raced for them, and naturally, I won.

      I won the cornbread and then proceeded to . . . well, choke and cough, if you must know the truth. Cornbread is very dry. Week-old cornbread is even drier than fresh. I wolfed it down, just as I might have gobbled meat or regular bread or any one of your other food groups.

      Wolfing cornbread is a bad idea. Never wolf cornbread. It’s made of tiny particles, don’t you see, and they are dry and they can get caught in your . . . whatever.

      Your windbag. Your breathing pore. The hole your air goes through when you take a breath. We call it the Coffus Makus for reasons which are too complicated to explain.

      Oh well, I’ll try, even though it’s very very technical and scientific. See, in Security Work we have to use a lot of technical terms. Your ordinary dogs can’t handle the big words