Read Online The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) by Clair Huffaker - Free Book Online Page B

hesitantly, repeating the earlier point that had impressed me so much, “they sure did pull those soldiers off our backs awful fast.”
    Shad took another thoughtful haul on his smoke. “We’ll see,” he said finally. Then he dropped the butt and slowly ground it out with his boot. “We’ll decide it after breakfast.”
    By saying that, he’d backed off about half the width of a gray hair, and Rostov, in a low, hard voice, backed away roughly the same distance. “When there’s only one decision, that decision is always right.”
    There was still the feeling of intense, swift trouble hovering deadly and invisible between the two men.
    “Well!” Slim clapped his hands together, making a kind of a period in the conversation. “Now that’s settled, what’s for breakfast? You an’ them cossacks a’ yours like t’ try some cowboy beans?”
    Rostov ignored Slim’s question. He turned curtly on his heel and walked back toward the cossack horses, his men following.
    “Boy,” Slim said, frowning. “He sure is kind of an abrupt fella.”
    Shad looked off toward the cattle. About half of them were up by now, others staggering to their feet and shaking their heads as if to clear them. Then he looked toward the hill where some of the curious Russians from the night before had begun to gather again. “Crab, you and Mushy cook up some bacon and beans. Natcho, you and Link and Chakko see t’ the horses. Keats, go and tell those people they can have their pots and stuff back. And pay ’em whatever you think is fair.”
    As the others started away to their jobs, Keats said, “I think those people mostly just wanted t’ be helpful.”
    “Pay ’em. I don’t care what, but pay ’em.”
    “I’ll work somethin’ out.”
    “The rest of you come with me. We may have t’ punch a few a’ those cows back t’ life.”
    He was right. About forty head were lying down in a drunken or chilled stupor. We pounded on them to get their attention, and sometimes a few of us more or less hauled them up onto their feet.
    All except one. A young coyote-dun bull had frozen to death, the poor darn animal’s four legs stretched out straight and stiff and hard as rocks. Christ, how you hate to lose an animal!
    We’d lost two cows on the sea voyage, and now three head in one night, and it hit Shad pretty hard.
    “More’n likely a heart attack,” Slim said, “and then he froze in the night.”
    Keats came up to where we were standing around the frozen bull. “Those people won’t take anything at all,” he told Shad. “They loaned us those things last night just t’ be friendly, an’ so I thanked ’em.”
    “You thanked ’em?” Shad looked at Keats with eyes still cold and grim from looking at the dead bull. “I told you t’ pay them!”
    “Well how the hell can I pay them if they won’t take any pay?”
    Shad’s hard words had the finality of a nail being driven strongly into an oak plank. “I don’t want t’ be beholden to any man in this country!”
    “But there’s no way t’ pay those people! What they did for us was a free and open gift!”
    Shad took a deep breath and looked down at the frozen bull for a long, frowning moment. “Then tell ’em we’re giving them a free and open gift back! Fourteen hundred pounds of beef!”
    That was one hell of a decision. Every man there knew that meat would have seen our whole outfit through more than two good months of steaks and stew.
    “That whole beef for half a night’s loan a’ some beaten-up pots?” Dixie asked.
    But Old Keats, who somehow looked kind of pleased about what Shad had said, was already on his way. And it surely worked out.
    Those Russians didn’t have much in the way of beef, according to Keats. And while they were too proud to take anything in terms of pay, they were really deeply moved about the gift they’d been given in return. While we were eating breakfast beans some of the white-shawled women got over their shyness enough to come down