The Hobgoblins Three

I'm Chuck, and me and my brothers Billy and Claude are the hobgoblins three.

We've been looking after the good folks of Buena Vista, Colorado, for a hundred years. Not that anybody's ever thanked us.

Humans have got a funny way of remembering the one thing you didn't fix and forgetting the hundred things you did.

And now, would you believe it, the whole darn town's out hunting us with shotguns and pickup trucks, all because we stopped Old Man Corbin's barn from burning down.

There's gratitude for you.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, you ought to know a little something about hobgoblins.

We're not particularly handsome creatures, I'll grant you that. We're about three feet tall, with ears like soup ladles, noses that arrive five minutes before the rest of us, and feet so big we could probably walk across the Arkansas River without getting our knees wet.

Billy's purple, Claude's green, and I'm brown. Don't ask me why. That's just how we came out.

Billy's the smart one. He can patch a wagon wheel or a tractor engine with equal ease. Claude's the worrier. He thinks every shadow's a posse come to chase us off.

And me? Well, somebody's got to have a little fun.

We live in an abandoned silver mine up in the mountains overlooking Buena Vista. It's a comfortable enough place, once you get past the bats and the occasional rattlesnake. We've got three beds made from old feed sacks, a cast-iron stove, and enough odds and ends collected over the years to open our own hardware store.

Billy's even rigged up electricity from an old generator somebody threw away.

Claude says we're going to burn the mountain down.

Claude says that about most things.

We've been living there since before anybody thought to pave the roads around here. Back then, folks rode horses, carried lanterns, and had the good sense to go to bed when the sun went down.

Nowadays, everybody's got electric lights, automobiles, and those little telephones they stare at all day.

You'd think with all those inventions, humans would have learned to take care of themselves.

You'd be wrong.

Most nights, we come down from the mountain after dark and make our rounds.

You'd be surprised how much trouble humans can get themselves into.

Take Mrs. Henderson, for instance. Sweet old lady, but she couldn't remember to close her chicken coop if her life depended on it.

Every other night, we'd find the door swinging open and some hungry fox licking his chops.

I'd chase off the fox, Claude would count the chickens, and Billy would fix whatever was broken.

One morning, Mrs. Henderson spotted a purple hair caught in the latch.

She went straight to the sheriff.

“Somebody's been stealing my chickens!”

Never mind that she hadn't lost a single one in six months.

Then there was Jenkins, who owned the hardware store on Main Street.

His roof leaked something terrible. Every time it rained, water came pouring through the ceiling and soaked the merchandise.

Billy climbed up there one night and patched the whole thing.

The next morning, Jenkins accused his neighbor of trespassing.

Said somebody had been walking around on his roof.

Which was true, I suppose.

But you'd think he'd have noticed that the buckets he'd been setting out to catch the rainwater weren't needed anymore.

And don't get me started on the Henderson boy.

He'd leave his bicycle in the road, his fishing tackle in the creek, and his schoolbooks wherever he happened to drop them.

We must have saved that bicycle from getting run over a dozen times.

One night, I decided to teach him a lesson and hung it from the branch of an old cottonwood tree.

Billy made me take it down.

“No unnecessary mischief,” he said.

Sometimes I wonder whether Billy's a proper hobgoblin at all.

Anyway, things were bumbling along nicely until the trouble at Old Man Corbin's ranch.

Now, Corbin liked three things: his horses, his whiskey, and his rifle.

Unfortunately, he wasn't always particular about which one he was supposed to be holding.

Every Saturday night, he'd drive into town, settle himself at the local saloon, and drink until he started telling stories about the time he'd wrestled a mountain lion with his bare hands.

Nobody believed him, of course.

Least of all the mountain lion.

One Saturday, he came home full of bourbon and convinced somebody was stealing his cattle.

Nobody was.

But that didn't stop him from grabbing his rifle and firing at every shadow he saw.

“Come out, you miserable cattle rustlers!” he hollered.

Billy and Claude were mending a fence behind the barn when the shooting started.

I was over by the water trough, trying to persuade a particularly stubborn mule to move his backside.

Suddenly, there was a tremendous crash.

Corbin had fired straight through the barn window and knocked an oil lamp off its shelf.

The lamp shattered, and burning oil spilled across the straw.

Well, you know how quickly dry straw catches fire.

Faster than Claude can say, “I told you so.”

Billy grabbed a bucket. Claude ran for the pump. I rushed inside to get the horses out.

Now, horses are wonderful animals, but they aren't particularly reasonable when their house is burning down.

One kicked me halfway across the barn.

Another tried to climb into the hayloft.

And a third decided that the best place to hide was behind me.

We finally got them moving, and Billy and Claude started throwing water on the flames.

That's when little Jenny Corbin and her brother Kyle came running outside.

Jenny took one look at Billy, standing there with his purple face and enormous ears, and screamed.

Kyle saw Claude and screamed even louder.

Then Jenny spotted me.

I screamed too.

I'm not ashamed to admit it.

There's nothing quite so frightening as a pair of children hollering at the tops of their lungs when you're trying to put out a fire.

We dropped our buckets, tripped over a rake, knocked down a stack of feed sacks, and ran straight through a pile of manure.

By the time we made it over the fence, Corbin was stumbling out of the house with his rifle.

“Monsters!” Jenny cried.

“Three of 'em!” Kyle shouted.

“Where?” Corbin demanded.

“There!”

He fired.

The bullet missed us by a country mile and put a hole through his own water tank.

Which, considering the circumstances, was probably the last thing he needed.

We didn't stop running until we reached the mine.

By morning, the whole town had heard the terrible news.

Three hideous monsters had attacked Old Man Corbin's ranch and tried to burn down his barn.

Never mind that the barn was still standing.

Never mind that all the horses were safe.

And never mind that Corbin himself had been shooting holes in everything that moved.

The sheriff organized a search party.

A dozen men piled into pickup trucks, armed themselves with shotguns, and headed into the mountains.

They had flashlights, hunting dogs, and enough beer to keep the local brewery in business for a month.

One fellow even brought a butterfly net.

I never did figure out what he intended to do with that.

For two weeks, we stayed inside the mine.

Claude was beside himself.

“I told you humans couldn't be trusted,” he said. “I told you somebody would see us. I told you we'd end up stuffed and mounted over somebody's fireplace.”

“Nobody's stuffing anybody,” Billy said.

“That's what you think!”

Personally, I was getting bored.

There's only so much checkers you can play in a cave, especially when Claude accuses everybody of cheating.

Meanwhile, things started going wrong down in Buena Vista.

Mrs. Henderson lost six chickens to a fox.

Jenkins's roof started leaking again.

A broken fence let thirty head of cattle wander onto the highway.

And somebody forgot to close the gate at the Miller ranch, leaving a herd of horses loose in the middle of town.

The sheriff blamed the hobgoblins.

“They're taking revenge!” he announced.

Claude nearly fainted when he heard that.

“Revenge? We haven't left the mine in two weeks!”

“Well,” I said, “maybe it's time we did.”

Billy looked at me.

“You've got a plan?”

“Not exactly.”

“That's what worries me.”

That night, we slipped back into town.

We fixed Mrs. Henderson's chicken coop, patched Jenkins's roof, rounded up the Miller horses, and repaired the broken fence.

Then we headed over to Corbin's ranch.

Because, quite frankly, the old fool was likely to set himself on fire again.

Sure enough, we found him asleep in the barn with a smoking pipe dangling from his mouth.

A little pile of hay beside his chair had already started smoldering.

Billy stamped it out.

Claude took away the pipe.

And I tied Corbin's bootlaces together.

Just a little harmless mischief.

The next morning, Corbin stumbled into town, complaining that monsters had attacked him again.

“They tied my boots together!” he shouted.

The sheriff called another meeting.

“These creatures are getting bolder,” he declared. “We have to put a stop to them.”

Billy shook his head when we heard the news.

“We save their animals, repair their homes, and put out their fires, and all they want to do is shoot us.”

“Maybe we ought to leave,” Claude suggested.

“And go where?” I asked. “Leadville? Salida? You think humans are any smarter over there?”

Billy sat quietly for a long time.

Then he said, “I think we ought to let them take care of themselves.”

Now, that was a surprising thing to hear from Billy.

But we agreed.

For the next month, we didn't lift a finger.

We didn't mend a fence, fix a roof, close a gate, or chase away a fox.

And Buena Vista went to pieces.

Cattle wandered through people's gardens.

Chickens disappeared.

Pipes burst.

Doors fell off their hinges.

Jenkins's hardware store flooded so badly that he had to close for a week.

And Old Man Corbin managed to set fire to his barn again.

This time, there weren't any hobgoblins around to save it.

Fortunately, the volunteer fire department got there before the horses were hurt.

At the next town meeting, the sheriff announced that the monsters had finally been driven away.

The townspeople cheered.

Then Mrs. Henderson stood up.

“Well, if they're gone,” she asked, “how come everything keeps breaking?”

Nobody had an answer.

Jenkins scratched his head.

“Come to think of it, my roof never leaked when those creatures were supposedly running around.”

“And my chickens were safe,” Mrs. Henderson added.

“And somebody always used to close my gate,” said Mr. Miller.

The sheriff cleared his throat.

“Coincidence.”

“Maybe,” Mrs. Henderson said. “But it's a mighty peculiar one.”

That evening, somebody left a small basket outside the entrance to our mine.

Inside were three fresh apple pies and a handwritten note.

To whoever's been helping us all these years. We're sorry.

Claude read the note three times.

“It's a trap,” he said.

Billy examined the pies.

“Smells like apples to me.”

I took a bite.

Best pie I'd tasted in a hundred years.

We've been back to our regular rounds ever since.

The sheriff still claims there aren't any hobgoblins in Buena Vista, and Old Man Corbin still insists that monsters tried to burn down his barn.

But Mrs. Henderson leaves a little dish of cream beside her chicken coop every Thursday night.

And Jenkins has started putting his broken tools outside the back door, along with a plate of cookies.

We fix what we can.

We eat what we like.

And every now and then, when somebody's been particularly careless, I might tie a pair of bootlaces together.

Billy says I ought to stop.

Claude says we're going to get caught again.

But me?

I figure a hobgoblin's entitled to a little fun.

After all, we're monsters.

Aren't we?