The Case of the Hooking Bull by John R. Erickson

. . . Little Alfred’s voice! “Hankie, here Hankie! I came back for you. Where are you?”
    Hey, I barked, I howled, I moaned, I whined, and then I struck out swimming for the edge of the tank. When I got there, I was pulled out by Little Alfred and, I’ll be derned, Miss Viola, Slim’s lady friend.
    And yes, Mister Burden-of-Guilt was there, hopping up and down and spinning around in circles. “Oh my gosh, Hank, when we didn’t see you, we thought maybe the coyotes had got you, and boy, you talk about feeling bad about something! I wasn’t sure I could make it through the night.”
    â€œThanks, Drover. In the absence of meaningful action, it’s the thought that counts.”
    â€œYou bet, and boy, I’ve done lots of thinking, sure have.”
    Well, Miss Viola picked me up and carried me to Slim’s pickup and laid me on the floorboard (I was still wet, see). And on the way back to the ranch, I began piecing together the rest of the story.
    After they had left me at the windmill, Slim and Little Alfred made the slow drive back to head­quarters, with the boy at the controls and the pickup in Grandma Low. When they got there, Slim crawled on his hands and knees into the house and called Miss Viola on the phone.
    She lived down the creek, you might recall, about five miles below our place, and she came streaking up the valley to take care of Slim. She tried to load him up in her car and take him to the doctor, but he didn’t have any great love for doctors or hospitals, and anyways, by that time he’d already diagnosed his own case.
    He’d been mashed pretty badly by that horse, but the wreck had taken place in soft sand, so he’d come out of it with some bruises and cracked ribs—just the kind of things he could treat with wool fat, salty meat grease, and Absorbine Jr. And no doctor.
    So Miss Viola got him loaded into a bed and sent Little Alfred down to the saddle shed for all that high-tech medicine, and after a couple of hours, old Slim was back on the road to recovery.
    And it was then that Little Alfred remembered his promise to me and coaxed Miss Viola into driving up into the pasture to get me. So there you are.
    When we got back to headquarters, Miss Viola carried me into the house and made a pallet for me on the floor beside Slim’s bed. They discussed the pros and cons of letting me stay in Sally May’s house, but they decided that since I had saved Slim from the Hooking Bull and had shown incredible courage on the field of battle, it was only right that I should be allowed to stay inside.
    Which was plenty fine with me. As beat-up as I was, the thought of camping out on my gunnysack bed didn’t excite me much.
    And let me tell you, before she went back home that night, Miss Viola made quite a fuss over me and my injuries. She pulled all the burs, moss, and mud out of my coat. She dug a few ticks out of my ears and gave me a good brushing. And what would you say if I told you she fixed me some warm milk with a raw egg mixed in?
    Honest, she did all that. Miss Viola not only had good taste in dogs, but she knew how to make invalidism pretty derned attractive. I mean, I could have stood quite a lot of that kind of treatment.
    The next morning she came back and fixed us guys a nice big breakfast. Would you believe scram­bled eggs and bacon for ME? Shucks, I made up my mind right then that if Slim didn’t have sense enough to marry that gal, I just might give it a shot myself.
    Well, everything was just about perfect, right up to the moment we heard the car pull up in front of the house. It was Loper and Sally May, back from their trip, and suddenly I began feeling very uneasy about, well, being in Sally May’s house, for one thing, but then there was another little matter that, uh, weighed even heavier on my mind.
    It had to do with strawberry ice cream.
    Sally May was not overjoyed to see me inside the house. I could tell by