Clair Huffaker - The Cowboy and the Cossack

“What the hell,” Yawn mumbled, “’r them white things?”

Instinctively, somehow, I knew that might be a good question not to know the answer to, but it had already been asked. “They’re symbolic wedding dresses,” Rostov said quietly. “Those men up there are prepared to be wedded—to death.”

That was a grabber. And we were all silent with our own grim thoughts until Crab finally wet his lips and said harshly, “Them bastards c’n do however they feel like! But I’m too young t’ git married!”

A big, heavyset Tartar now rode into sight at the left end of the long line of riders. It was too far away to make out his face, but he looked very strong. He was wearing a sort of cloak that looked like bearskin, and he had some kind of a strange, round metal hat on.

“Kharlagawl,” Rostov said.

Shad raised his rifle, but before he could line up on the distant, almost impossible shot, Kharlagawl rode back out of sight. Then the thunderous war horn boomed out again, and in its booming, the mass of Tartars, bells jangling shrilly in what was now one high-pitched scream of sound, lunged their horses at full speed down the slope toward us.

“Well,” Slim shrugged, spitting some tobacco onto the ground, “like the man says, ya’ can only die one time.”

“Trouble is,” I muttered, “that one time ya’ die is often fatal.” Which was about the best I could come up with, considering how shaky that tightrope of courage in my head was getting. Watching those warriors come at us hell-bent for election, that hideous screaming racket of theirs getting louder, the thought briefly crossed my mind to throw down my gun, turn around real fast, and outrun everything that ever lived.

“Forget it,” I muttered angrily to myself. “You ain’t fast enough, Levi.”

Shad heard my low mutter and glanced at me, seeming to look right into my mind. And he did, for he then gave me a wooden sliver of a grin and said quietly, “Nobody is.”

The charging Tartars were halfway down the slope toward us now, about a quarter mile away.

“Any man waits t’ see the whites a’ their eyes,” Slim said, “will more’n likely wind up bein’ dead.”

“Each man be his own judge,” Shad said. “And start shootin’ when ya’ won’t be wastin’ bullets.”

With that, he raised his rifle, fired and brought down a distant Tartar who’d taken a slight lead over the others.

Before that first far-off warrior had hit the ground, Rostov’s gun roared and a second warrior was sent spinning wildly off his horse.

Within a few seconds we were all blasting away. Not being the world’s greatest shot, I held off longer than most. But with my first five rounds I brought three Tartars down, hitting either them or their ponies, or in one case maybe even both at once. It was still too far away to know for sure.

But that distance was closing awfully fast.

Twice I ran out of bullets and swiftly reloaded. The rifle breech and barrel were now so hot that the metal was burning blisters on my fingers, but I didn’t notice.

When I raised my rifle to start firing again, that bunch of Tartars looked damnere close enough to spit at. But we just naturally started shooting faster, and at that closer range hitting our mark more often, so our bullets were tearing them to pieces.

Finally those still in the charge were close enough to start shooting back, and they handled their weapons in first-class style. A bullet whanged against the rock in front of me and flying bits of stone cut the hell out of one side of my face, but I didn’t notice that pain any more than the heat of the rifle barrel.

Funny, but the two things I remember most right then were an ant walking across the back of my thumb and the overwhelmingly bitter smell and blinding smoke of burnt gunpowder. I saw the ant, a little red one, marching across my left thumb as I was gripping the rifle barrel with that hand and about to aim. And all of a sudden, I looked at the whole goddamn roaring mess from that poor little ant’s point of view. Fantastic, monstrous giants all around him, trying to blow apart the entire world. And all he wanted in that entire world, most likely, was to get back home in one piece, sit down with his ant friends, and hopefully take one huge, long sigh of relief.

So I gently brushed the ant off my thumb.

And then very quickly, to make up for that lost moment of time, I shot my next Tartar, who was less than a hundred yards away and coming on at full speed.

So many things happened so fast then that it’s hard to keep them in order. But brave as they were, the Tartars in that charge had been slashed to ribbons. I doubt that more than thirty of them were still asaddle when they were within a hundred yards of us. And most of those survivors just couldn’t face our deadly, withering fire any longer. So a lot of them at last spun their horses, and in all that din and confusion and heavy smoke managed to get away and back up the hill.

But not all of them went back.

Seven Tartars galloped to and over the breastwork, and there was some brief, wicked close-hand fighting.

I’d run out of bullets in my rifle for the third or fourth time, and there sure as hell wasn’t time to reload now. So I jerked out my revolver, and that old Navy Remington .44 sounded like a cannon as I shot a Tartar dead center through the chest. It wasn’t all that great marksmanship on my part. His chest was only about a foot from the muzzle, and at the time, he was about to hit me with one of those razor-sharp, long-bladed battle-axes that some of them carried.

In almost that same instant, two of them leaped toward Rostov. He ran one through with his saber, but the other was already swinging at him with a viciously curved, two-handed sword.

Before Rostov could jerk his saber out, and even before I could aim the Remington again and pull the trigger, Shad was there using his now-unloaded rifle as a club. Holding it by the barrel, he hit that Tartar so hard that it not only broke his head but sent him rolling wildly far out into the hollow behind us.

And by then the other men had finished the other Tartars who’d made it to the breastwork.

In the sudden, deafening silence, Rostov and Shad looked at each other, and I knew that they were both remembering the time before, when Rostov and his saber had stopped another Tartar from killing Shad. And thinking back to that, Shad finally said, “Maybe a rifle only has a few deaths in it. But a rifle butt goes on forever.”

Slim stepped to them and said, “Lost three men, an’ Igor’s hurt.” Then Slim looked at my face. “An’ Jesus Christ, you’re bleedin’ t’ death.”

Gregorio had got an arrow right through his head, a mean-looking thing with ugly kind of fishhook barbs cut into the stone arrowhead itself, so it would tear the living hell out of anything it went into or came out of. And poor old Essaul had been shot in the throat. It was a terrible wound that left a gaping hole where it had come out. Looking down at him Slim said with a quiet sadness, “Goddamn bullet musta been big’s a doorknob.”

And the third dead man, at the end of the line, was Mushy. One of the seven Tartars who got to the breastwork had driven a lance through Mushy as his pony was leaping over.

Taking the lance out wasn’t easy. Finally some of us held his body down and Shad started to pull it out, but at first it made a couple of snapping sounds, like some little bones were breaking inside there.

“Can’t ya’ be a little easier, Shad?” Rufe asked, his low voice kind of uneven.

“No, Rufe, nobody can.” My throat was dry. “An’ we can’t leave the goddamn thing stickin’ out of ’im.”

“Wanna pull it out yourself?” Old Keats asked him.