The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) (12 page)

“I don’t know how Shad’ll take that. He likes t’ make do on his own.”

“Tell him it’s a gift. In partial repayment for the pinto he gave to Igor, after you made him do it.”

“How’d you know it was anything like that?”

Rostov glanced at me briefly with those damned dark, piercing eyes as he reloaded his rifle to full-up with cartridges from his bandolier. “You wanted to in the first place. He knew you were determined, and somehow right. Therefore, he made the gift.”

“You sure are jumpin’ to conclusions.”

“I looked at you the night Igor had to shoot his horse. Right then you were almost ready to give him your own.”

“I hadn’t even
thought
about anything like that.”

“Yes. You had. Whether you know it or not. You couldn’t even look at me, or Igor. You understood.”

“Well, when you get right down to it then, Shad finally understood everything. And a whole lot better than me.”

Rostov finished reloading his rifle. “That’s right. He’s not a bad fellow. Except for being opinionated and prejudiced.”

I started to get mad, but Rostov didn’t give me time. His deep eyes fixed on mine with a certain sadness in them, he shoved his rifle firmly back into its saddle holster.

“I hope not, but one day I may be forced to kill him.”

That was a stopper.

Getting mad went clear out of my head, and I wanted to say a thousand things against that idea but couldn’t think of any one thing to say in particular.

But it was too late anyway.

Rostov had already spurred his horse off at a gallop toward the two deer.

That night I took one of the deer back to camp tied behind the cantle of my saddle. It was dressed and bled and all ready to cut up and cook.

Every man there was really tickled at the prospect of fresh venison. Mushy and Link, who were on cooking duty, set up a Dutch oven by the fire to make two rump roasts with onions and beans, and a little bacon fat added for flavor.

Crab, who still had his arm in a sling but was feeling a lot better, said, “Hey, goddamnit, this is gonna be a goddamn feast!”

Shad said, “I heard two shots, Levi. Neither one came from your thirty-thirty.”

“Rostov got two deer. Gave one to us.”

“Why?”

He didn’t say it loud or hard, but it made everybody silent. “It was his way a’ thankin’ us a little bit—for givin’ Blackeye to Igor.”

Dixie frowned up from where he was working on one of his stirrups near the fire. “I ain’t so sure I want no goddamn cossack-shot venison.”

Old Keats raised his bad arm as high as he could in an exasperated gesture. “I imagine it tastes just about the same as if it was cowboy-shot.”

“Hell.” Slim grinned. “Meat’s meat. I just hope
nobody
else eats it, so then I can finish it all.”

The two roasts turned out really fine, and everybody did eat their share of them.

Except Shad.

After all of us others had helped ourselves, he just quietly took some beans and coffee and let it go at that.

On top of what Rostov had said before, that made me damned sad and thoughtful.

Later, after we’d eaten, Old Keats came over and sat down on the ground beside me. Sammy the Kid was idly fooling with his guitar, and a few of the others were playing showdown by the fire, laughing and passing the deal back and forth among them.

Off in the distance, from the cossack camp, we could dimly hear another string instrument, and some of the cossacks were humming a pretty, peaceful tune in a low, strong way.

“How ya’ feelin’?” Old Keats said quietly, and I knew that Shad was on his mind too.

“Sad an’ thoughtful,” I told him accurately.

“Yeah?” He hunched forward, clasping his arms around his knees. “Well, personally I’m not feelin’ too bad, m’self.”

“How come?”

“Shad didn’t eat any a’ that venison. But on the other hand, he didn’t send you packin’ right over t’ the cossack camp t’ give it back. I think there might be some hope there for that hardheaded bastard, somewhere.”

Shad had gone out to take a ride around the herd, checking it. He rode back in now and took care of Red. Then he poured a cup of coffee and came over to sit beside us.

After he’d settled down and taken a couple of sips, he said, “Somethin’s botherin’ you, Levi.”

“I dunno exactly how ya’ know, but damn right there is.”

“What?”

“Rostov.”

“Why?”

“He—He’s got an idea that—sometime you an’ him may come t’ tanglin’ ass. And that wouldn’t be any fun at all, for anybody.”

“Hell.” Shad took another slow sip of coffee. “Didn’t you know about that possibility up front, Levi?”

“Not the way he said it!” I kept my voice down so that it was just the three of us in the conversation, but I couldn’t keep the worry out of my voice. “What he said about you, word for word,
was, ‘I hope not, but one day I may be forced to kill him.’ An’ that Rostov’s sure as hell one tough sonofabitch!”

Shad shrugged very slightly and drank some more of his coffee.

Old Keats frowned. “What the hell’d he say a thing like that for? He knew ya’d have t’ tell Shad.”

“It’s pretty easy,” Shad said. “He figures we’re gonna come up against some tough times. And he thinks that as bosses he and me may have some strong differences of opinion on what t’ do under certain circumstances.”

“Well, then—” Keats hesitated. “What he told Levi wasn’t so much a threat as a friendly warnin’.”

I nodded. “I think maybe so. He sure looked unhappy as hell when he said it. Maybe if you just tried to cooperate with ’im—”

Shad ignored what I was suggesting. “One way or the other, I won’t lose much sleep over it.” He finished his coffee and stared quietly at the cup. “All I want is t’ get those longhorns delivered. If there’s need for any fights along the way, then they’ll be fought.”

“Maybe he didn’t actually mean nothing,” I said hopefully, without really believing it. “Maybe he was just kinda foolin’ with me a little.”

“That man would never fool about fightin’, or killin’.” Old Keats had the same sense of foreboding that I had, and he looked grimly at Shad. “I’d sure as hell hate t’ see you two rough bastards go against each other. It’d have t’ be kinda like the earth itself gettin’ torn apart.”

Shad wasn’t all that impressed. He stood up, stretched and yawned slightly. “One thing I meant for damn sure. About not losin’ any sleep.”

He went over to get into his bedroll, and Old Keats turned to me. “You got an extra problem that I shoulda guessed by now.”

“Which extra problem?”

“Well, Shad’s like your big brother. But you’ve also gotten t’ kinda respect an’ like Rostov.”

“Oh, hell!”

“Don’t oh-hell me. That’s as it should be, and I know Rostov earned it.” He scratched his chin, frowning. “It’s just—If they do get around t’ getting into a scrap, don’t get yourself in the middle. That’d be awful perilous ground. With them two, only one of ’em would come out alive.”

Maybe what he said about not getting in the middle gave me the idea, or maybe I’d have thought of it anyway, but the next day I told Rostov what was uppermost in my mind. We’d ridden ahead and he’d paused at the top of a hill, so it gave me a chance to speak.

“Captain Rostov, sir?” I said.

“Umm?” He’d been intensely studying the far hills, and he turned to me.

“You—you said somethin’ about one day maybe havin’ t’ kill Shad Northshield.”

“Yes.” He was now studying me with that same intensity, and yet as always it was mixed with that strange kind of humor that seemed to forever be lurking somewhere in his eyes.

“Well”—I took a deep breath—“I just wanted t’ mention that even if ya’ could kill Shad, which is unlikely, that you’ll have t’ kill me first.”

Even though there was a tiny grin at one edge of his mouth, his gaze was still boring right through to the back of my head.

“And don’t tell me nothin’, please, about a puppy barkin’. I’m just tellin’ you right now. But I can bite, too.”

He looked at me for a long, fairly spooky moment, and then his teeth flashed in an unexpected and totally genuine smile that damnere dazzled me. “Good for you, Levi. But I expected no less.”

Then he turned abruptly and rode off, and that was the end of the conversation.

“Well hell,” I muttered to myself and Buck. “Is Shad still in jeopardy, or me, or both of us, or whomever the hell ever?”
Buck twisted his left ear back, thinking what I was saying was a little silly.

So after all my intended bravery, I had no choice but to let the talk stop there and follow Rostov, going at a full run to try to keep up.

Rostov had said his piece, and for damn sure meant it. I’d said mine, and meant it. And Shad hadn’t even bothered to put his two-cents’ worth into it, which in my mind made them about even.

I rode after Rostov knowing that he would never say anything more about killing Shad.

He might do it, but he wouldn’t talk about it.

And that was the hell of it. Just the idea that while he’d never talk about killing him again, he might just up, sometime, and take a crack at it.

CHAPTER NINE

R
OSTOV NOW
started taking even more of an interest in talking to me, telling me about things as we went along, and that tended to be one hell of an education all in itself. I guess he’d decided maybe I wasn’t a puppy.

I’d like to think that.

Also, he quietly saw to it that I gradually got to know the other cossacks.

Aside from Igor, the two others who spoke American, though they called it English, were Lieutenant Vassily Bruk and Sergeant Nikolai Razin. They hadn’t got the language down quite as good as Igor, but they held their own pretty well.

The lieutenant, Bruk, was the oldest man among the cossacks. He was lean and taciturn, and despite his age, which was probably pushing up over fifty, was as tough as a hardened old iron bar. Actually, I think our old man, Keats, had a few years on Bruk. But as Rostov later explained to me, in better words of course, when a fella’s as far advanced in years as either one of them was, and still banging around on hard, active duty, you have to figure he’s pretty special in the first place, and likely has that extra inner resilience of mind and body that can push a rare man clear up over the hundred-year mark and find him still raring to go for a good fight, a few drinks, and maybe even a lady or two.

If I’d had to compare the other one, Sergeant Nikolai Razin, to anyone in our outfit, it would have been Slim. He was as heavyset as Slim, with what looked like a fat belly, but in both their cases it was still all muscle. And while they were both quick to smile and loved to laugh, running up against either one of them would be like taking a knife and fork and trying to make a quick dinner out of a good-natured, slightly potbellied bear. You wouldn’t get much to eat, but it would be your most memorable, and last, dinner.

The sergeant sure didn’t actually look a lot like Slim otherwise. He had a strongly Oriental cast to his eyes, and a deep, ugly scar that ran from the top of his forehead down narrowly around his left eye and clear to the bottom of his chin. And something I’d never seen before, he only wore a beard on the right side of his face. I think he liked to keep the left side clean-shaven because he was proud of that scar and that way everyone could see the huge, ugly battle mark in all its glory.

Aside from their quickness to laughter and their big stomachs, there were two other things that made me think of them in the same way. Sergeant Nikolai Razin didn’t want to be called anything by anybody except “Nick.” And Slim was so much that way that most of us would have been hard put to remember his last name. Another similarity, it was Nick that I’d happened to see that one time before, giving his last drink of water to his horse.

As for the rest of the cossacks, they were kind of a mixed bunch. Not as mixed up as we were, with Shiny Joe and Link, and Natcho and Chakko, and even Purse. But you could tell they came from a lot of different people and places and times. Their eyes went from blue and green to dark brown and hazel. And tall or short, they ranged from a few sandy-haired ones to mostly jet-black hair.

Their full names were too hard to even fool around with. They had last names like Yevdokimov, Gordiyenko, Naumenko and Vishnevetski.

One night Crab Smith and some of the others got me trying to pronounce the few full names I could think of offhand. There weren’t many.

“Jesus Christ!” Crab’s hurt arm was nearly completely okay by now and he rubbed his head with it. “Ain’t one of ’em got a good, simple, civilized name like Smith? They must be crazy!”

“How’s your arm?” Old Keats was being sarcastic and Crab knew he was right, so he shut up then.

“Their first names’re generally easier,” I told them.

“Like what?” Mushy grunted suspiciously.

“Well—” I concentrated. “Essaul, Ilya, Ivan, Yuri, Dmitri, Victor—”

“Victor?” Sammy the Kid asked. “You sure you ain’t confused?”

“That sounds almost American,” Dixie said.

Shad was rolling a cigarette. “Go ahead, Levi.”

“Kirdyaga, Vody, Gerasmin, Pietre, Yakov.” I frowned. “That’s all, best m’ memory serves.”

“Talk about dumb fuckin’ names!” Rufe shook his head.

“Our names are just exactly as dumb t’ them!” Old Keats looked at Purse, Natcho and Link, who happened to be sitting near each other. “Want some real dumb names? Percival! Ignacio! Lincoln Washington Jefferson Jackson!”

“Hell,” Purse said, “no reason t’ get pissed off at us.”

“Shoot, no,” Link added. “We didn’t have nothin’ t’ do with gettin’ them names.”

“That’s exactly what I’m sayin’, goddamnit!” Keats told us.

“No point gettin’ all excited,” Dixie said. “Levi’s the only one who’s got t’ keep track a’ them dumb Russian names.” He added, with a kind of a mean, troublemaking look at me, “And friendly as he’s got with them, an’ with that stupid name a’ his, he’s the perfect one t’ do it.”

You could never tell about Dixie. A few of the others laughed, and as tired as I was that night, I started to stand up to fight if need be. But Shad was on his feet already. “My official given name ain’t Shad,” he said quietly and not too easily. “It’s Shadrack.” He looked around with hard eyes. “Anybody want t’ make a joke about that?”