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good-bye.”
    â€œDon’t say good-bye. You just got here and we haven’t talked.”
    â€œYes, and I can’t tell you how much I regret that, because I don’t regret it.” I trotted away from her again. “We haven’t talked and we never will talk. In the first place, you’re a cat and I make it a habit not to talk with cats.”
    Here she came again. I kept moving.
    â€œTalking with cats is not only a waste of time, but it’s also a violation of the Cowdog Code. We’re not allowed to mingle with cats on the job. Or off the job. Or anywhere else. Nothing personal, but you’re a cat.
    â€œIn the second place, my ride will be here any minute now.” I stopped and scanned the horizon in all directions. Nothing. Not a sound except the soft tinkle of snowflakes. “My business associates will be picking me up soon and . . .”
    She had caught up with me. I crawled under a barbed wire fence and trotted out into the horse pasture.
    â€œAnd in the third place . . . I hate to put it this way, Kitty, but you are absolutely driving me nuts with all that rubbing and purring!”
    â€œBut I haven’t seen a friendly face in so long!”
    â€œYes, and it’s made you a lunatic. That’s what you are, a lunatic cat, and nobody could stand to be around you for more than a minute.”
    All at once her whole manner changed. Her eyes widened. Her jaw began to tremble. Tears slid down her cheeks. “You called me a lunatic cat!”
    â€œYes ma’am, I did.”
    â€œYou don’t care about me.”
    â€œYes ma’am, that’s correct. In my deepest heart of hearts, I think you are totally weird.”
    She burst out crying. “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going to eat some worms!”
    And with that, she went flying back into the yard, crawled under the house through a hole in the foundation, and disappeared. In the silence, I could hear her sobbing under the house.
    Well, it served her right.

Chapter Seven: Holy Smokes, I’ve Been Abandoned!

    I returned to the front of the house and began pacing around near the point where three pasture trails merged with the main road out of the ranch.
    Slim would be coming down one of those roads and I wanted to be there when he came through. I was pretty sure that he would stop anyway, and honk his horn and call for me, because . . . well, by then he would have missed me and would be frantic with concern, but I didn’t want to take any chances on getting left.
    So I paced around in the middle of the road—waiting, watching, listening. In the course of listen­ing, what I heard was Mary D Cat, crying under the house.
    It didn’t bother me at all, even though we Heads of Ranch Security have a warm side to our nature and we are famous for being kind to children. I mean, that’s just bred into us. To be­come a Head of Ranch Security, a guy must take a Solemn Cowdog Oath to protect and defend and be nice to all children, even the ones who are bratty.
    But we also have this other side, which is cold and hard and made of quarter-inch-steel armored plate. It allows us to conduct slashing interrogations and solve murder cases without the slightest quiver of emotion. We’re talking about your basic hard-boiled ranch dog here, and listening to sad stories is just part of the job.
    It was this cold, hard side of my nature that greeted the sobs of Mary D Cat. Yes, I heard them but they bounced off my steel-plated eardrums like . . . I don’t know what, but they bounced off.
    I continued to pace in the snow.
    Don’t get me wrong. Making ladies cry had never been high on my list of Fun Things to Do, even lady cats. Maybe some dogs get a kick out of it but I don’t. I do it when I have to. It just goes with the job.
    Every once in a while you make a lady cry. It can’t be helped, and I wished she would stop crying.
    Hey, I’d told the truth, is