Disgusted, Old Keats called out, “That’s stupid! Why don’t ya’ all just shut up!”
But he didn’t have enough authority to make it stick.
And then, from the Russian camp, where damnere all of them had now joined in their song to drown us out in turn, I heard Rostov’s voice giving a short command.
Their music stopped abruptly, and Sammy and our singers were suddenly left out on a musical limb that was loud and unmelodious as hell.
“De Camptown Races” sort of stumbled to a stop about where somebody was puttin’ their “money on the bobtailed nag,” and Sammy gave up playing.
“Well,” Dixie said, “I guess we showed them.”
Shad and Slim rode back up and dismounted, and Shad walked closer in toward the fire. We could see he was mad, and Sammy put his guitar away quickly.
“If we ever do run into any Tartars,” Shad said, “there’ll be no need of guns. You dumb bastards can sing ’em t’ death!”
Everybody went to bed pretty fast about then, but within most of them there was still a general feeling of resentment and downright hostility toward those nearby cossacks. And it wasn’t too difficult to figure out that the cossacks were feeling the same way toward us.
It exploded just after breakfast the next morning.
Dixie had gone over to the spring where Shiny Joe and Link were filling their canteens, and at the same time three or four cossacks came up to their side of the spring to fill some water bags.
One of the cossacks, Yuri, looked at the two black brothers and said something to his friend Vody, and they both laughed.
It may have been an innocent remark or otherwise, but Dixie took it as being otherwise. “What the hell’re you laughin’ about?” he growled.
“Aww, take it easy,” Link said. “They dunno what you’re sayin’ anyway.”
“Nobody,” Dixie snarled, “makes fun a’ my friends just b’cause through no fault a’ their own they happen t’ to be niggers!”
That was kind of funny because Dixie was the most prejudiced fella who ever walked. And, in an unfortunate way, it got even funnier. Sergeant Razin, Nick, was one of the cossacks there. He looked at Dixie and said as quietly as he could in his rasping accent, “No one is making fun of you niggers.”
Not even knowing what the word meant, he’d accidentally cut Dixie to the quick by calling him a nigger too, and from there on it started getting unfunny real fast.
“Nigger!” Dixie roared. “Me?” And he put one foot forward into the shallows of the spring to swing his fist across and hit Nick on the jaw. That was sort of like hitting an oak tree, and it probably hurt Dixie’s fist more than Nick’s jaw, but Yuri and Vody were already lunging across the spring at Dixie. He went down beneath them and Shiny Joe and Link jumped in to help Dixie. Nick and the other cossacks splashed through the spring to join in, and in about three seconds, with cossacks and cowboys hurtling in from both directions, it was a full-scale riot that was getting closer to killing with each flying second.
Some of the participants were really getting hurt, and aside from the furious, swirling mass of fistfighting and rassling, cowboys were suddenly starting to grab for their guns and cossacks for their sabers.
Yuri, with his head lowered so all he could see was a pair of chaps, hit me in the stomach as I came running up, and an instant later Natcho, Big Yawn and Chakko charged by me like a three-man battering ram, knocking him to the ground as they joined the main battle. Yuri leaped up and was the first cossack to get his saber out.
Shad appeared beside him, revolver in hand, and knocked the saber out of his hand with the gun, then swung the gun in a backhanded blow that knocked Yuri flat again. Then Shad raised his gun and fired three times into the air.
At those three roaring blasts everyone was brought up short and the fighting suddenly stopped.
Even Nick, who’d been busy strangling Dixie in the spring, now let go and stood up, soaking wet. Dixie, choking and gasping for breath, sat up half in and half out of the spring.
Rostov, who’d been out of camp a little ways, galloped up now and dismounted.
Nobody was moving, but there was still a tension and anger among all the men there that you could actually feel in your skin, like hot, stormy weather.
Rostov’s blazing eyes swept over us. “Who started this?”
Shad put his gun away and said flatly, “One a’ my men.”
The fight was over, but if it just got left like that, with the mean and bitter feelings we all had now, there’d be scars of anger on both sides that wouldn’t ever heal. And there was no possible way to say anything, or do anything, that could somehow make things right between our outfit and the cossacks.
Except for one thing.
And that’s the thing that Shad did.
Yuri was just getting up, and he now stepped forward to pick up his fallen saber.
But Shad reached down and picked it up for him. With all of the men watching, he slowly put his left hand out in front of him. Then, without a word, but with all the quiet meaning in the world, he drew the razor-sharp edge of the saber across the back of his own wrist, cutting it so deeply that his blood gushed out and flowed freely.
After that, paying no attention to the bleeding, he tossed the saber slightly into the air with his right hand, caught it by the blade, and offered it back handle first to Yuri.
The saber had drawn blood.
Yuri and Shad looked at each other for a long, stony moment.
Then Yuri finally nodded, understanding, and though his outside expression didn’t change much, you could see that on the inside there was a new and growing respect for our boss. He and all the other cossacks were getting an insight into the caliber of the man that Shad was.
Yuri took his saber and, silently accepting Shad’s blood on the blade, slowly put it back into its scabbard.
And somehow, by a strange magic in that quiet, strong thing that Shad had done, none of us around that spring there felt much like enemies anymore.
No one had to say anything about that sudden kind of a warm feeling Shad had caused. We all just felt it.
I had a hunch Rostov felt it most. He was still sore about the fight, but he was looking at Shad in a slightly different way, his original, hard anger now tempered almost involuntarily by something else. If I’d had to name just what that something else was, I’d have made an educated guess, knowing Rostov, that it was a small, almost begrudging touch of admiration.
Shad then turned and started back to camp, and fifteen minutes later the herd was moving through the early morning sunshine and some faint low-valley mists, on its way north again, toward Khabarovsk.
CHAPTER TEN
IN A way, that fight had made us closer. During the next few days, even though we generally camped along streams that ran damnere forever on a roughly east-to-west basis, small tributaries of the Ussuri, our camps at night just somehow managed to get a little nearer, and nobody seemed to mind it a whole lot.
Old Keats used to say that the more men were really men, the more they were like little boys. And sometimes they had to just naturally knock each other down, just to sort of get a general feeling about each other.
In any case, we weren’t quite so much total foreigners, back and forth, as we’d been up until then.
One night I finally got around to telling our outfit about why the cossacks all wore those scarlet-red vests, so that if they were hurt in a rough battle their blood wouldn’t show up so much. And even Dixie didn’t make any fun of that idea.
On the contrary, he said, “That ain’t too bad of a notion, all in all. Half a’ bein’ on top a’ the other guy is just showin’ him you ain’t hurt or scared.”