She (wants to be) a little runaway

This dog is my heart but lately she has been giving me a heart attack. Story: since we have been working on/lived in the house there has been a "runaway basset hound" on our street. It belongs to someone about 4 or 5 houses down from us and walks down our busy road randomly during the week and on weekends. We've tried to catch it with no luck to see if its got a tag on its collar. Now the runaway has a little buddy - a black lab mix stray that runs down our road with it. We know this dog doesn't belong to anyone but believe the owners of the basset are feeding it. Andrew saw it for the first time this winter, he went to let Bessie out and it was on our porch so he scared it off. All of its hair stood up and it barked and growled at him and Bessie of course wanted to run off after it.

Two times in the last week these dogs have been in our yard or running down the middle of the road and just as I open the door to put Bessie on her run (no we don't keep her chained, she just loves to be outside and her run is totally humane) she sees the dogs and takes off. It happened to me this morning and I screamed bloody murder running after her barefoot through the muddy yard hoping she didn't run into the road. Once we got back to the house I called the non-emergency police number and they said they would send a sheriff out but the dogs ran off and I didn't ever see the sheriff show up.

I am afraid that one day either Bessie is going to get bit or get in a fight with one of these dogs or she will run after them on the road and get run over by a car. I've exhausted everything and our county doesn't have a dog warden (and the number to call for runaway dogs, well they are only there from 11am till 4pm and closed on weekends). I would be so devastated if anything happened to Bessie, but now I just don't know what to do!