he needed.
“Go charm someone,” he told Dixie as he tied his rope. “Tell them the owners waiting up top.”
“You mean lie?”
“Someone’s waiting, somewhere,” JT said.
So Dixie went off in search of a willing, if gullible, hiker. Meanwhile, half their group headed up to the outpost. Jill and Mark both wanted the boys to send a postcard, but Sam knew his time with the dog was coming to an end and refused to leave; and since Jill and Mark couldn’t force Sam to go, they couldn’t force Matthew, either.
“Of course we wouldn’t dare lay down the law, would we,” said Mark. “Far be it from us to exercise our parental authority once in a while.”
Sam, in fact, began to engage the dog in an innocent chase game, ducking and darting, sending up soft sprays of sand. JT saw this as a good thing; potential rescuers would see Blender for the energetic hound he was, not some sick runt who’d collapse halfway up the trail. He even took Blender’s life jacket off, the better to display his freshly scrubbed coat. In fact, it wasn’t long before Dixie captured the interest of a ragtag couple laden with army-surplus gear—the neediest having the kindest of hearts, JT thought. He was all set to walk over and present them with a couple of trip vouchers, when the group who’d trekked up to the store returned with guilty looks on their faces.
“What’d you do, get ice cream?” JT asked.
“Who could resist?” said Mitchell. “You want me to go get you a Fudgsicle?”
“I’ll take a rain check,” JT said. “Any news from home?”
“The pay phone was out of order,” Mitchell reported.
“Darn,” said JT.
At the same time, Sam continued to entertain hikers with Blenders tricks. Matthew for his part was drawing an elaborate map in the sand with a stick, but nobody noticed. And so Matthew tried to get in on Sam’s game, waving the stick in front of the dogs face, then running a little, then waving the stick again. When Blender didn’t respond, Matthew dug in his pocket and found some cookie crumbs. These he held out to the dog. Blender trotted over, sniffed, licked the crumbs. Then he bounded back to Sam.
Who knew exactly what was going on in Matthew’s mind? For as long as he could remember, his younger brother had been getting more attention—ever since around the time of Matthew’s first birthday, when his gift, so to speak, was a red-faced yawling bundle who from the very start was entitled to more lap time than Matthew. This grabby, blind addition to his world, who stole his mother and kept her bedridden for what seemed like weeks on end, went on to draw better pictures and tell better jokes and end up with the more complicated Lego sets each Christmas.
In any event, while Sam was playing with Blender, Matthew went back to JT’s boat and opened up the food hatch and got out the peanut butter. He stuck his finger in the jar and smeared a large glob on the end of the stick. Then he took the stick back to where Sam and Blender were playing and held the stick in front of the dog’s nose.
This time Blender gave the stick his full attention. Matthew held it just out of reach, and then, when he knew the dog was thoroughly spellbound, he flung the stick as far as he possibly could out into the river and watched, wiping his hands on his shorts, as the dog bounded, sans life jacket, into the water.
At first it seemed like any other competition between two brothers, Sam outraged over the theft of attention, Matthew smug. As for the stick toss, at first it was just that, a dog chasing a stick into a friendly body of water. And Blender did indeed retrieve the stick, proudly dog-paddling back toward shore.
But the current at Phantom Ranch is swift and strong, and has swept more than its share of hikers to their deaths; and to both Sam and Matthew’s horror, suddenly Blender’s dog-paddling was doing him no good whatsoever, and his body disappeared, leaving only his head above water, his jaws locked around the stick as he sailed like a toy boat down toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Upon seeing the dog bounding into the river, JT tried to make an immediate dash for the water. However, in accordance with the laws of physics, coupled with the lack of traction, his sudden lunge forward sent his feet skidding out behind