CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SHORTLY AFTER sundown, with our eight men still not back from Khabarovsk, Rostov sent out replacements for his guards, and after a while those who’d been on lookout rode back into camp. Sergeant Nick was among them, and he spoke briefly with Rostov. Then they left their fire and approached ours, where Sammy the Kid and Mushy, taking their turn at cooking duty, were starting beans and biscuits and coffee for supper.
Rostov said to Shad, “Verushki still has several small patrols spotted around us.”
“That ain’t hardly a surprise.”
“At least,” Rostov said, “they’ve been staying far away, well out of shooting distance, simply trying to discover what they can about us.”
“Which ain’t much in this broke-up country,” Slim said. “They can’t make a halfway educated guess how many we are. F’r that matter, even how many cows we got.”
“Tonight,” Nick rumbled, “they maybe come in closer, in dark.”
Along with some others, Rufe was listening. “They do,” he volunteered, “they’ll git their asses shot off.”
Nick nodded his big head heavily. “Right. But makes trouble.”
“What the hell.” Slim shrugged. “Even in the dark they won’t be able t’ come in near ’nough t’ see a whole lot.”
For a moment no one spoke, and then Shad changed the subject abruptly, almost angrily. “I wish t’ Christ those fellas’d get back.”
To use Shad’s words from a minute before, what he’d just now said wasn’t hardly a surprise, either. We were all feeling that same way, especially since the going of the sun, with the quick Siberian darkness moving like a sudden black wave rolling across the sky to sweep out all the light in the world.
“Well, boss,” Slim ventured to say, “ya’ told ’em t’ be sure t’ have a good time.”
“Not that good!” Shad tried to make his anger hide his deep concern, but we all could see it was there. He growled, “They oughtta be back here right now!”
And at that very instant Rostov’s guard on the point overlooking Khabarovsk called out in Russian, his voice dimly reaching us. Rostov looked at Shad and laughed one of his rare laughs. “Our eight men are on their way into camp.”
There couldn’t have been more than a millionth of a second between Shad’s growl and the yell from the hill, and it was somehow so funny we were all torn about halfway between sheer relief, and laughing our relieved heads off.
“By God!” Slim said with a broad grin. “When you say somethin’ boss, fellas really do jump!”
The sound of hoofbeats came closer, and the eight men rode into the light of our two fires and dismounted. The only sign of a problem I could see was that Shiny’s right hand was bandaged just about the same as my left one was.
Old Keats nodded at Shad and said, “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
Then, as Bruk told the cossacks what had happened in Russian, Keats went on to us. “First thing we did was pay Colonel Verushki a social visit, big as life an’ twice as brassy, Shad, like you said. He was madder’n hell about his man gettin’ shot this mornin’—in the leg incidentally. And we reminded him of the terms previously arranged, whereby we’ll soon go on our way in peace as long as he and his men don’t bother us.”
Sammy and Mushy brought up some cups and a pot of coffee.
“For our conquerin’ heroes,” Sammy said.
When Mushy poured into the cup Shiny was holding, I saw for the first time by the unsteady way the cup moved that Shiny was in worse shape than a simple bandaged hand would cause. All of a sudden, at ten feet away, I could sense that he’d had as much white whiskey as I’d had and couldn’t hold it any better.
“Verushki’s still worried about us,” Keats went on, “but only just barely. He still thinks that somehow we’re bluffin’, but he ain’t quite prepared to move against us upon that hopeful concept.”
“Go on,” Shad said.
“So then, actin’ like we owned the town, we bought some supplies. An’ then went back to that same place for a few drinks.” He hesitated, a little sadly. “Maybe it had t’ do with the two big fellas who got hanged, but the place was pretty filled up with hostile Imperial Cossacks and they were lookin’ for trouble.” Keats shook his head in a brief, rueful way. “Right now, in that one place, I’ve seen glasses broken for the most beautiful and the most ugly reasons ya’ could imagine.”
Already Shad was glancing at Shiny’s bandaged hand. “Yeah?”
“They challenged us t’ some ‘friendly’ arm-rassling, for drinks. But they smashed off the top of two glasses an’ put them on the table where each man’s hand’d be forced down if he lost.” Old Keats gave Shiny a warm look. “He took on the biggest bastard they had.”
“And lost!” Shiny said cheerfully, holding up his bandaged and slightly weaving hand.
“Between you and Levi,” Shad told Shiny, “I now have two hands.”
Shiny misunderstood. “We’re not just two hands, boss! We’re your best two hands!”
“With two men I normally hope for four hands,” Shad said quietly, but Keats was already going on with growing excitement.
“And then we put in Kirdyaga and Big Yawn! And honest t’ God, I guarantee that there are at least ten Imperial Cossacks who don’t have full use of both of their hands right now.”
Rostov and Bruk had come up, and Bruk said, “This is true. We impressed them first with our boldness. Secondly the two blacks impressed them very much. Finally our strength impressed them. They are as respectful and afraid of us as we are of them. And that is the final measure of our day.”
That sounded like a pretty good measure to all of us. But, a little wobbly himself, Big Yawn now lifted his nearly empty coffee cup. “An’ here’s t’ Levi!”
None of us could see any point in that, and I said, “Why?”
“That sweet-lookin’ girl there asked for ya’.”
It had to be Irenia, and my heart gave a kind of a little jump in my throat. “Yeah? How did she happen t’ remember me?” I knew it had to be something like because I was so handsome or charming, or both at once, but all of that ought to come from her, so I manfully held off. “Just how?”
Bruk took over, since he was the one who had talked to her. “She asked about you as the youngest American, the one who couldn’t drink.”
“Oh.”
That was a hard blow. I remembered her because of her pretty face and tablecloth dress, and she remembered me because I was a drunk. I tried to act like I didn’t care in the first place, but it didn’t matter in the second place, because nobody was paying any attention to me anyway, back in the first place.
Supper was about ready in both camps, and the group was starting to break up, even though it was only a few steps back and forth.
But before my brokenhearted supper, that nobody took note of, two things happened.
First, Dixie came over and said in a low voice, but straight out to Shiny, “I lied to you. Nobody never called you nothin’ this mornin’.”
Shiny looked at him with those big, friendly, slightly bleary eyes of his.
“You’re wrong,” Shiny told him. “A man called me a man this mornin’.”
That got to Dixie, and I don’t think Dixie could have taken much more of anything just then. All in all, it hadn’t been too great of a day for him. So what he said was short and to the point. “I just told ya’ I lied to ya’.” He hesitated a moment. “That’s by way a’ sayin’ I’m sorry for the way I felt.”
Shiny did a strange and nice thing then. It reminded me, somehow, of me with the pine cones before, when I’d tried to tap each one like Queen Victoria gently knighting some old fellow. Shiny reached out and touched Dixie just that gently on the shoulder, as if he were forgiving him, or knighting him. And he said, “I’m sorry for the way I felt, too.”
Then they both turned and walked away. But they always seemed close after that, before the first one died. So close th
at you could almost feel it between them, invisible and warm as a summer breeze in the air.
And then that second thing before supper happened.
Shad said to Rostov, “Are your lookouts good enough to let one a’ them patrols out there get through for a little while t’night?”
“Yes.” Rostov nodded. “Why?”
“Build a couple more fires. And have every man lay out an extra bedroll. From a distance, in the dark, it’ll shape up t’ be a sixty-man camp.”
But Rostov had already started nodding before Shad finished talking. “We’ll let them through just far enough and long enough to give them that impression, and then drive them away.”
Shad said, “Just for the hell of it, think I’ll ride lookout with your men m’self t’night.”
“You take the first half of the watch and I’ll relieve you for the second.”
Shad didn’t disagree with Rostov, which for him was a quiet agreement.
“For Christ’s sake,” Old Keats said, “let’s try t’ not shoot any more of Verushki’s men. He’s all set t’ blow sky-high any minute.”
“We want ’em t’ ride out in one piece,” Shad said, “so they can report what they think they’ve seen.”
Rostov doubled his guard right after supper, and Shad was getting ready to ride off, when Slim said, “Mind if I come along, boss?”
A little later they left camp together, and the rest of us built the extra fires and laid out the added bedrolls. Most of us had only two blankets, so it was kind of cold sleeping in just one, with the other one made up off to one side with an imaginary fella in it. I’d stuffed a few clothes and a couple of rocks into my other blanket to make a sort of a dummy. But that dummy was sure sleeping a hell of a lot better than I was. It was not only cold, but my cut hand was throbbing, so I finally gave up and pulled on my boots and went over to the nearest fire, where four men were gathered.
Natcho and Old Keats were watching Rostov and Igor, who were seated and playing some kind of a game on a checkerboard by the light of the fire.
In the silence, Natcho was the only one who glanced at me as I came up. “Chess,” he said.
It seemed like both he and Old Keats had a fair idea what was going on, and I didn’t want to appear too dumb. “Yeah.” I nodded as though this came as no news to me at all. “Quite a lot like checkers.”
Rostov gave me one of those expressionless looks, which still somehow managed to hold brief, silent laughter deep in his eyes. “You understand the game?”
I’d done it again. “Well, t’ be perfectly honest, Captain, there’s a whole lot I don’t know about it—hardly at all.”
Igor now made a funny kind of a zigzag move with a piece shaped like a horse’s head, and then Rostov made an even funnier move clear across the board at an angle and wound up taking one of Igor’s pieces.
“T’ be real perfectly honest,” I said, sort of hinting for a clue about these strange moves, “I guess I’ve just about forgotten every damn thing I ever did know about it.”
“The word ‘chess’ is a derivation of the Persian word ‘shah,’ meaning ‘king,’” Rostov said, waiting for Igor’s next move. “It’s a game of war that’s probably more than four thousand years old.” Then, as they continued playing, he patiently named all the pieces and the different ways they could move, which I immediately forgot.
But then Rostov said something none of us forgot. “It’s not only a game of war. There’s a great deal of philosophy in it. And it represents the way the world has been for thousands of years. Even since the beginning of time.
“The king and the queen, each in its own way, have and wield the ultimate power. In approximately equal proportion, they use religion and their military, the bishops and the knights, to defend whatever positions they may choose to take and to attack the enemies of those positions. The castles at each corner of the board represent their crucial power of wealth in terms of land and possessions.”
He paused, frowning inwardly at the comparison he was making, and moved by it. Then, finally, he continued. “But always and forever, it’s the pawns, the simple people themselves, who are the first to be sacrificed ruthlessly, for whatever reasons seem at the moment to be an advantage to any of the others.”
None of us had ever heard any game defined like that, and it was plain to see that Rostov was thinking of a lot more than just chess.
After a silence, I said, “Sure beats the hell outta checkers.”
Studying Rostov, Old Keats added quietly, “You like the game of ‘king.’ But you sure don’t like livin’ it in real life, here in Russia.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Poor damned pawns.”
“It’s almost impossible,” Rostov said, “but if a pawn can manage to get to the far end of the board, while he’ll be under the heaviest possible attack, he’ll also have a chance of becoming the most important piece there.” He glanced at Igor and at some of his sleeping cossacks. “We are the pawns. And Siberia is our far end of the board.”
Igor nodded at these words, as thoughtful as the rest of us. And then, concentrating, he slowly made his next move.
It was also his last move.
Without hesitation Rostov shifted a piece to another square and said, “Checkmate.”
Under his breath, Igor grumbled a couple of words in Russian that must have translated something like “Sonofabitch!” Then he grinned and shrugged and knocked one of his pieces down in a gesture of defeat.
They turned the board over then and I saw that it was actually a small box that they could put the pieces back in and then snap shut. Putting them away, Rostov said, “Checkmate is from the Persian shah mat, which means ‘the king is dead.’ ”
“And no king was ever more dead than mine,” Igor said. Then he added quietly, “I’d never thought of the philosophy of chess that way, sir. It’s almost as though—” He hesitated, uncertain of which words to use.
But Rostov understood. “As though each game contains its own complete life-and-death drama.”
Igor nodded, and now snapped the filled chess box shut.
Rostov stood up and stretched his shoulders, and then we heard the shots. There were about seven of them, in quick, broken order, and the roaring guns were close enough out there in the dark to make my ears ring a little.
By the second or third shot, Rostov had already swung into the saddle of his nearby black and was racing off into the night toward where they were coming from. All over the camp, sleepy men were reacting in different ways, some of them leaping out of their bedrolls, others just raising up slightly, still partly asleep and groggy.
Now there were three more shots, farther away, and then silence. I doubt if the whole thing, from first to last shot, took more than a minute or so. For myself, I’d figured it best to make it back to my bedroll and get out my old Remington .44 and cock it, just in case. And then the shooting stopped.
Everybody in camp had a gun at hand by then. But already, even while a couple of fellas were still swearing and jerking on their boots, there was the sound of distant, galloping hoofbeats returning.
“Four horses,” Natcho said.
It was Shad, Rostov, Slim and Nick who rode out of the night and up to the light of the fires. Nick had a grin so wide that it ran from the bearded half of his face clear over to crinkle up the scar running down the other side. He and Rostov rode on a few paces to tell the cossacks what had happened, as Shad and Slim dismounted near us.
Slim looked just about as pleased as Nick did, and Shad himself didn’t seem exactly displeased.
“Well?” Old Keats demanded. “What happened?”
Slim stepped to the fire to warm his hands over it. “It was so goddamned purely perfect! An’ then funny as hell on top a’ that!”
“Funny?” Keats frowned from Slim to Shad.
“It was fairly amusin’,” Shad admitted, starting to unsaddle and take care of Red.
“First, we spotted this three-man patrol,” Slim went on. “We held bac
k an’ let ’em sneak in just close ’nough t’ take a quick peek. An’ they damn well figure we’re twice as many as what we are.”
“Christ,” I said, “they coulda been standin’ right here b’side me for a minute an’ got that same idea from all these bedrolls.”
“Then we cut loose an’ shot all ’round ’em,” Slim continued, “an’ they beat a retreat that’d make greased lightnin’ look lackadaisical. An’ about that time two more lookouts spotted ’em an’ blasted away. They musta thought they was surrounded by all the hounds a’ hell!” Slim laughed and rubbed his chin. “What’s funny,” he chuckled, “is one of ’em plain damn fell right smack off his horse! An’ them other two lookouts a’ ours captured it! By pure accident, we got ourselves one a’ the Tzar’s most outstandin’ subjects!”
Keats was the only one by now who wasn’t grinning along with Slim.
“How d’ya’ know ya’ didn’t shoot ’im?”
Still chuckling, Slim said, “Nobody who’s just got shot c’n git up an’ damnere outdistance his fella horsemen on foot!”
But Old Keats still wasn’t too happy. “Goddamnit, Shad,” he said, “we just might embarrass Verushki into a fight!”
“Hell,” Shad said with quiet innocence, “we can’t hardly help it if his men can’t stay put aboard their own damn ponies.”
“Well,” Keats said firmly, “I think we oughtta take ’im back.”
“Oh, we will,” Shad agreed, still innocently. “First thing t’morrow.”
Somehow, Keats didn’t quite like the sound of that, and somehow I couldn’t blame him. But then Ilya rode into camp at a trot, leading the captured horse, a good-sized gray with an unusually fancy silver-inlaid saddle on its back.
We and the cossacks, all of us still looking pretty pleased, gathered around to take a look at the gray.
“Damn shame t’ return ’im,” Slim said. “If there’s anything I purely hate, it’s givin’ up well-earned spoils a’ war.”
I got a few hours’ sleep before it was my turn with the herd, and it was well into morning when Mushy rode up to take over for me. On the way back to camp, I circled around a little to see what was going on at the war-games meadow. And I was glad I hadn’t gotten there before, in time to join the activities going on.
The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 21
