Clair Huffaker - The Cowboy and the Cossack

“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 back 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.

Lieutenant Bruk and Slim and a few others were standing near their horses by the big rock, watching seven men who were going like bats out of hell out there on the meadow, finishing that wicked racecourse.

Three of them were Slash-Diamonders—Natcho, Sammy and Purse. And except for Natcho, they weren’t faring too well. Sammy and Purse trailing behind, both elected to go too close to the next-to-last pole, which was in some thick trees, and they both had to pull up at the last minute and pick their way through or they’d have likely had their heads torn off by the stout low branches. Most of the others were strung out and approaching the last obstacle, the creek, where the quickest way involved that suicidal ten-foot jump over the twenty-foot drop. Most of them chose to take a wide berth around that last pole, some of them even splashing through the shallows about three hundred feet off to the far side of the high, dangerous leap. Natcho took the stream closest in, where it was about an eight-foot drop, but he did it so easily that you could see there was no risk for either him or his Diablo. That put him neck to neck with Gregorio, who’d had a slight lead before, and that’s the way they finished, flashing past the finish line near the rock in a dead heat. The other cossacks now came roaring by, and Purse and Sammy finished a faraway last and next to last, looking like they might melt in their own anger.

Even after they’d slowed their mounts and come back, they were both still too mad to say anything. Bruk said flatly, not talking down to them, “You both did well.”

“Bullshit,” Sammy said.

“He’s right.” Slim’s voice was quietly hard. “Idea is t’ git there fast as ya’ can, but git there. If you’d tried t’ bust through them thick trees at a run, you’d both still be back there lookin’ around f’r your heads.”

Bruk said something to his men, and five of them went galloping out toward the center of the meadow. Then he told us, “This is a cossack way of making a rider and horse one and the same. I imagine you’d call it trick riding.”

“Hell.” Slim frowned. “Ridin’ a horse ain’t no trick; it’s a way a’ makin’ a livin’.”

But when those cossacks got out in the meadow, they started doing things that are in total honesty almost impossible to relate.

They were up and over and under their full galloping horses. They dropped little handkerchiefs out there in the meadow, and charged back by and picked them up with their teeth, nine-tenths out of the saddle. Two of them even raced in together, and one fella, Pietre, leaped full speed onto the back of the other fella’s horse. The other fella happened to be Dmitri. I’d actually never gotten to know them too well, and therefore never had a really great opinion of either one of them, and I was a lot more than a little startled at how graceful they were when Pietre now somehow got his feet on Dmitri’s shoulders and stood full up.

There is just no way to ride a horse like that, with one man standing on top of another man’s shoulders.

But they did it, for about three or four agonizing, long seconds, and then Pietre lost his balance, though he pretended not to, and did a neat flip off of Dmitri’s shoulders and landed, kind of skidding, but still on his feet.