Just a Dog by Gerard Michael Bauer Read Free Book Online

zapped him up but he outsmarted them and found his way back to earth somehow. Or how he was really a secret agent dog and he’d been away working undercover on a top-secret spy mission. I know all those stories are pretty stupid, because Mister Mosely was just a normal dog and couldn’t have done any of those things. But I still liked making them up anyway.
    If you really want to know what I think happened to Mister Mosely I’ll tell you. I think he was helping someone somehow. Like maybe there was somebody who needed him for those two weeks more than we did and that’s why he stayed away. Maybe someone who was hurt or sick or someone who’d lost their memory or was in some kind of trouble. I can’t say for sure if that’s right or not, but I hope so. It’s the kind of thing I think Moe would do.
    In the end I guess it didn’t really matter whyMister Mosely went away that time. It only mattered that he came back.
    But I still haven’t told you the best part of the Mister Mosely’s Mystery story. The best part is how Mum took that ring I found on Moe’s name tag to a jewellery shop ‘just in case’ and found out that it wasn’t a fake at all. The jewellery shop man said it was made of real pure white gold and it had real diamonds and rubies and sapphires in it. It was worth a lot of money. Dad wanted to keep it because we really needed the money on account of how his work was being cut back. But Mum said we couldn’t because it didn’t belong to us and it wouldn’t be right. Mum won. She took the ring to the police and told them all about how Moe brought it home.
    Then one day, when we’d forgotten all about it, the police rang Mum and told her that nobody had come to get the ring, so it was hers. We all went crazy when we heard that. Mum ended up selling it to the jeweller. She said the money was a ‘godsend’. She said without it we would have lost our house for sure. That was because Dad had lost his job selling TVs and stuff and he still hadn’t found a new one. Mum called MisterMosely our ‘guardian angel’. She said he was definitely looking after us.
    We never did find out where Moe went to that time. That’s why I called this story Mister Mosely’s Mystery. It’s one of the worst Mister Mosely stories because of how bad it was when we thought he was gone for good. But it’s one of the best ones too because of how Moe came home and because of the ring and everything.
    Some stories are like that.

16 My Favourite Mister Mosely Story
    One of the best things about Mister Mosely was how he used to wait out the front of our house every day for me to come home from school.
    He started doing that when I was in Grade Three. That’s when Mum stopped picking me up from school because she had to work at the supermarket while Dad was trying to find another job. I didn’t mind walking home. It was just a couple of streets away and besides, I wasn’t a little kid any more. Mum still gave me a million instructions but and kept on telling me over and over to be careful and not to do anything stupid.
    Moe was waiting for me on the very first day I walked home. When I turned into our street there he was sitting on the footpath in front ofour house. And he was there every time after that. Mrs Nguyen who lives across the road told Mum that Moe sat for hours in the afternoon waiting for me. She said he was like ‘a big white sphinx’, which I thought was a pretty good way to describe him.
    But the best thing about Moe waiting for me was what he did when he saw me coming. First of all his tail would start wagging and then it would get faster and faster till you’d think it was going to come off. Then he’d start dancing around in a bit of a circle because our house was way down the end of the street and he wouldn’t be sure if it was really me or not. When I got closer and he knew it was me he’d