Clair Huffaker - The Cowboy and the Cossack

For a time, no one moved or spoke.

And then Shad moved and spoke. He took off his old beaten-up, front-pointed black cowboy hat, which was normally an object that couldn’t even be touched by anyone else without serious risk to both life and limb, and he handed it over to Rostov. “ Vostrovia ,” he said quietly.

Rostov handled the hat carefully, with the respect and dignity it deserved, and after a moment he took off his fur cossack hat and held it out to Shad.

Shad took it and looked it over curiously .

Then, finally, as if they were both wondering whether their heads could stand this radical kind of a change, they very slowly put on each other’s hat.

And when they’d done this, and started frowning around at the rest of us, trying to see some kind of a reaction, there wasn’t a man among us brave enough to tell them the truth.

They both looked great!

Rostov growled something in Russian to his men, and Shad at last said, “Well, goddamnit! Can ya’ recognize me, at least?”

Slim was the first one who got up the nerve to grin a little and say something to Shad. “Ya’ look downright gorgeous, Captain Rostov.”

Shad glared at Slim, and Old Keats said with some impatience, “You look exactly like Shad Northshield wearing a fur hat! What the hell did ya’ expect?”

Still a little uncomfortable, Shad shrugged. “Wasn’t quite sure.”

Ilya now said something in Russian to Rostov which caused some laughter among the cossacks. Igor told me later that Ilya had promised to write a song about an American cowboy named Rostov.

But between the two of them, and their simple exchange of hats, the whole idea about clothes was getting easier now.

Sammy the Kid said, “That cossack stuff ain’t all that bad. I’d look outstandin’ as hell in one a’ them black cloaks with the red linin’!”

“You wouldn’t be outstandin’,” Crab muttered, “in the bottom of a hole under an outhouse.”

Natcho’s white teeth flashed in a wide smile. “I’ve been wanting t’ try on one of those swords!”

“Sabers,” someone corrected him.

The cossacks now laughed a little bit at something else, and the whole feeling about clothes was rapidly improving.

I pulled off my leather jacket and handed it to Igor. He grinned and nodded and untied a little cord around his neck so that he could hand me his cape.

Within a few minutes, just exchanging things around in a friendly and curious way, we wound up being about as mixed-up an outfit as anybody ever saw.

But it was just that. Friendly and curious. Once in a while there’d be a little laughter here or there because some of our half-and-half outfits were downright absurd, but it still wasn’t a happy time, or even anything like that.

Those two hanged men were too much on all of our minds for any of us to want to, or be able to, just haul off and get a kick out of anything.

As a matter of pure fact, there wasn’t one man there who didn’t know just exactly what direction Shad and Rostov were pushing us in. Even Big Yawn, who was generally as thick as a brick wall, and who had been maybe the hardest-set against cossack clothes, was examining a big, baggy pair of flaming-red britches that belonged to Kirdyaga, who was about his same size. And Big Yawn had already made his mind up what he was going to do when he looked up from those red britches as Shad spoke out in a hard voice.

“In about ten minutes,” he said, “I want thirty cossacks t’ ride over that hill t’ pay homage t’ them two fellas.”

And about ten minutes later, that’s exactly what happened.

It wasn’t all that easy for the whole bunch of us to hurry up and look like cossacks, but we managed. Boots and hats were the scarcest items because a lot of Rostov’s men weren’t carrying spares. But there were plenty of capes and britches to go around, and those were what would be most easily seen and recognized at a distance anyway. For most of those ten minutes, us cowboys in that camp looked too ridiculous to even try to describe. Picking out fellas about their same size, the cossacks were bringing over their spare stuff, while we were getting down to our long Johns and starting, with a good deal of cussing and growling, to get into those unfamiliar things.

“My God !” Crab snarled. “This goddamn shirt buttons up the back !”

But Ilya, who owned the silken-looking shirt, saw the problem and started to give Crab a hand with buttoning it. I lucked out, because Igor had a complete second uniform that fit me like it had been made to order. The fur hat felt funniest of all, not having any brim to take hold of, but I was soon to find out that the good feeling of the cape more than made up for that. It felt kind of good and free when you were just wearing it normally, but mounted, when you opened your horse up a little, it went whipping out behind and around you like a huge bird’s wings flapping, giving you the feeling of damnere halfway flying.

Struggling into one of those blood-red vests that Nick had given him, Slim said to Shad and Rostov, “You ain’t leavin’ nobody at all in camp?”

“Nope.” Shad swung one of Rostov’s capes around his shoulders. “We ain’t gonna be gone but a few minutes.”

Rostov nodded. “This way, they’ll see the greatest show of force we can mount.”

“I still ain’t sure about me an’ Link,” Shiny said, pulling on a pair of Yuri’s britches. “Our complexions’re awful dark.”

“Pull your hats down,” Dixie said dryly.

“We won’t give ’em much time t’ study on us,” Shad told them. “Let’s get t’ horse.”

And a moment later we were mounting up and moving out.

Poor old Purse Mayhew, standing lookout, almost collapsed from sheer shock as all those cossacks came galloping up toward him, but then he saw Shad up front, and some of us others, and realized what was going on.

We rode past the still-openmouthed Purse, over the crest of the rise, and started down the far side. From here we could see Khabarovsk far off and below in the distance.

There were still a lot of people gathered around that big oak tree on the edge of town, so far away that even the huge tree itself looked small. I could just barely make out the two tiny figures hanging motionlessly from one large limb, and I swallowed hard.

“Pull up!” Shad ordered. “And line out!”

Rostov repeated the order in Russian, and within a few seconds there were thirty of us sitting our horses side by side, facing the distant crowd around the grim, terrible oak tree with its two hanging bodies.

Even from that far away we’d already been noticed by Verushki’s cossacks and the rest of the people there. Verushki’s men, staring off and up at us, must have had the same feeling I did. As I looked from one side to the other, at all of our fellas lined up, we sure didn’t appear to be a bunch to mess around with lightly.

Shad and Rostov were next to each other in the center of the long line, and they said something back and forth.

“Take out your rifles!” Shad ordered. “We’re gonna give them two fellas a three-gun salute!”

Rostov was calling out the same instructions to his men.

“Aim your rifles up!” Shad told us. “And shoot when I yell fire !”

We all cocked our rifles and raised them toward the sky.

Shad now called out, “Ready!— Fire !”

A slightly ragged, but damned impressive volley roared out and echoed across the wide, sloping meadows toward Khabarovsk.

Before the sound of the first volley had faded out of the air, Shad yelled “Fire!” again and the second thunder boomed out from our assembled guns. A few cossacks had single-shot rifles and couldn’t fire again, but with all the smoke and noise it was impossible to tell the difference. Buck started to rear under me a little, thinking we were overdoing the whole thing, and a couple of other horses weren’t all too happy, but by that time the third command came and the third roar of rifles rolled boomingly out across the meadow.