Clair Huffaker - The Cowboy and the Cossack

I wished, right then, that I had something, anything, to give her.

In all the old stories I’d ever heard about, and the few I’d read, it seemed like a decent sort of a fella always had something special and meaningful to give a girl when he was going away. Or at least he was off to do something that’d make her real proud. But I didn’t have one solitary thing in the world to give her, and delivering a bunch of cows someplace sure as hell wasn’t exactly searching for that Holy goddamned Grail.

Looking at Irenia’s downcast eyes as they clouded over sadder and sadder, I took a desperate inventory of everything I had on me and it still added up to nothing. I couldn’t give her my ugly, beaten-up old Stetson or my hand-tooled boots that’d looked pretty good a few years back. And the idea of my pocketknife or gun was even more foolish, if possible.

The only thing left to do was plain give up.

But then one final thought at last came to me. I was wearing my deer-hide jacket under that slicker, and it had two big matching buttons that held the front of it together. They were flat jet-black stones that had been made into buttons, and buffed and polished to a high gloss, so that they were really kind of pretty to look at in their own way.

Old Keats had given me those two buttons when I was just a kid, and I’d outworn a dozen jackets with them since then, wearing the buttons so much that they were simply a part of me. And you never normally think of that kind of a close part of you, any more than you normally think of your left or right foot while you’re walking.

Keats had also told me that there was some kind of an ancient and sad story about black stones like these, and about an Indian warrior and maiden who never had any luck getting together. So that the stones had finally become known as Apache Tears.

Anyway, I opened my slicker and pulled the top Apache Tear off my jacket and handed it to Irenia.

She saw that there were just two buttons and that each of us had one of them now.

She knew, somehow, that I’d been trying to think of something of myself to leave with her. And she could also tell that my time was getting short.

So she looked at me and said softly and gently the only two words she knew to say, “Hello, Levi.”

In all my life, and I know it will be so until I die, I have never heard a more beautiful way of one person saying to another—good-bye.

And then something made a sudden slamming noise behind me and I spun around to see an Imperial Cossack who’d just burst through the door. Now he swung on his heels just as quickly and went back out. He may have been drunk or he may have been checking up on me, but either way it was time to go.

Irenia had turned slightly away from me, her head bent down a little, so I didn’t try to touch her or to say any of the things I couldn’t have said anyway. All I could do was back quietly, softly out of the room, and then go quickly to where Shad and the others were getting ready to leave.

A few minutes later we were out of town and gathering speed through the almost blinding rain toward the point on the Amur River where the herd, hopefully, would just about be in position to cross by now.

In the lead, Shad suddenly put up his hand and pulled his big Red to a sudden stop. We all jerked up behind him. And then, in a crash of thunder and lightning, I saw what he’d already seen. On a hilltop before us, and facing down in the other direction toward where the cattle should now be, Colonel Verushki was ordering the forty or so Imperial Cossacks with him to move on, waving one arm and shouting something we couldn’t hear. His men galloped ahead and out of sight down the far side of the hill, and he waited on his horse there, peering off and evidently trying to make out what was happening below in the dark.

“Levi, stay with me!” Shad said. “You others circle ’round this hill t’ the right an’ ya’ oughtta come up drag on the herd!”

“An’ start ’em?” Old Keats called over the pounding rain.

“Damn right!”

“What about those Imperials?” Igor called.

“If they’re in the way, get ’em outta the way, however !”

They galloped off in the dark and the rain.

I’d thought the two of us were going to circle to the left and come up point on the herd, and that was what Shad had in mind, but not just yet. He spurred Red straight up the hill toward Verushki, with me sticking right on Red’s tail so that Buck and I wouldn’t lose them in the dark.

A few times, on that swift run up the hill, I could get a brief glimpse of what was happening in front of me, either by bursts of deafening, flashing lightning or sometimes, though it was harder to make out, just in the half-seen stormy shifting of darknesses ahead.

About a hundred feet from Verushki, Shad took his lasso off his saddle, but he didn’t uncoil it to make any kind of a throw. And then, as Shad sped on toward him, the colonel either heard the hoofbeats or sensed some danger, for he spun his horse around, jerking swiftly at his saber. But the blade never cleared its scabbard as Red raced that last short distance and Shad hit Verushki a slamming, powerful blow on the side of the head with his lariat. There was just enough give in that tough coil of rope not to kill Verushki where he sat in the saddle. Otherwise, it might just as well have been a club. The colonel’s hat went flying off into space, and he himself flew off his horse and went rolling across the muddy ground.

And when the colonel started to raise himself, still stunned, the first thing he saw was Shad sitting quietly there in the saddle, just above him, with a cocked revolver aimed right down at his head.

Verushki stood up slowly in the rain, instinctively reaching over to take hold of his horse’s reins. Maybe it was his cossack training or maybe some kind of a pride in what was an obvious aristocratic sort of a background, but he showed absolutely no fear.

“Are you going to shoot?” he asked Shad, in about the same way he might have asked what time it was.

“Hand me your saber,” Shad told him flatly.

Verushki frowned and hesitated, as curious as I was about this demand. Because sure as hell, Shad had no particular use for a saber. But he slowly took it out and handed it up to Shad, handle first. Then, for the first and only time that I ever saw, he smiled. Or at least he showed most of his front teeth all at once. “Are you planning on killing me with my own blade?”

“Now your gun.” Shad’s voice stayed deadly flat, with nothing showing in it.

When Verushki handed his revolver up, Shad’s hands were getting kind of full, so he handed the gun over to me and said, “Levi, throw that as far as you can.”

I gave it a good heave, way out into the rain and the dark, wondering even more just what the hell Shad was up to.

And Verushki, with a whole lot more at stake, must have been wondering the same thing. “Either kill me or let me ride out,” he demanded.

“Two things I want ya’ t’ remember,” Shad said.

“I have an excellent memory.”

“One, fifteen free cossacks made fools outta you and your whole goddamned garrison.”

“I was aware of that possibility.”

“More important, number two. Remember that poor little bastard cossack a’ yours who got bounced off his horse, an’ what you did to ’im.” Shad paused. “Remember that when you explain t’ your men how come you lost your gun an’ your saber and your horse all at once.”

I would never have thought that anything could get to Verushki as much as those words, but they did. Even though he’d been unafraid of outright death, he took a step back, his hand tightening on the reins he was holding. “There is honor!”