Shiny Joe looked at his brother, Link, with the kind of a look that would normally require a wink, but between them the understanding was already inbuilt. “You sure did that the other mornin’ in that fracas, Dixie. When that big cossack sergeant was holdin’ your head under the water, you didn’t say one damn thing t’ give him any hint that you were in trouble.”
“That’s very hilarious,” Dixie said. “But the whole damn thing wouldn’t a’ happened except that I was stickin’ up for you two goddamned niggers.”
But that was all in fun, and nobody was in the least bit mad at anybody else.
Rufe, sitting by the fire, tossed a small piece of wood into it. “I said it before, an’ I’ll say it again. They’re both a hasty an’ a heavy-lookin’ bunch, them cossacks.”
Shad was chewing a small wad of tobacco. He shifted it slowly in his mouth, glancing at the cossack camp nearby. “I ain’t about t’ issue you fellas red vests,” he said. “Hopefully you’ll have enough brains not t’ go around gettin’ yourselves hurt in the first place.” His tone of voice was just about as tough as ever.
I couldn’t help but think that Shad was a strange and unusual case. He was sure as hell a kind of an all-around genius in his own ways, and yet on the other hand it wasn’t too difficult for me to picture him standing for a whole long time in a pumpkin patch in Uporaskaya.
Rostov and I spent the next afternoon crossing some almost endless, low rocky hills a mile or so ahead of the herd. He was making it a point to learn every little bit I knew about longhorns, and we’d somehow gotten onto the subject of their coloring.
“There’s an old Western sayin’,” I told him, “that longhorns come, solid or speckled or painted, in every single color of the rainbow.”
He thought about this for a moment. “Purple?”
“Well—” I hesitated. “Some of ’em, sort of—in a way.”
“Green?”
“Well—” He never asked an easy question in his life. “I guess I’ve seen a few of ’em that had kinda, more or less, greenish spots.”
He thought about that for a moment. Then he said, “They are colorful, but I think that old saying is an exaggeration.”
He let it go at that for a while, and we passed over the last, low rocky hills into a vast, level plain of high, waving grass. In the distance far before us there was a jagged range of steep, tough mountains that looked like they’d been shoved up abruptly by God’s fingers on an angry morning.
And, somehow, it was an absolutely magnificent view, with ten million miles of crystal-clear blue sky above it.
Maybe it was that view that kicked me off, but whatever the reason, as we were cantering along through the high grass, I asked Rostov without thinking much about it, “Say, sir, do you believe in God?”
“I beg your pardon?” he said in that faultless English that was so good I was beginning to wonder where the hell he ever learned it. And in his case, it wasn’t American, it was English.
Repeating that kind of dumb question, that I shouldn’t even have asked in the first place, was sort of embarrassing, but I was stuck with it. I said once more, “Do you believe in God?”
We rode on a few strides before he finally answered, “Yes—and no.”
He was looking far ahead, across that huge plain of yellow, gently waving grass, toward the jagged brown mountains and the immensity of cool blue sky above. I didn’t think he was going to say anything more about that, but after a time he said, rather factually, “I believe that people who are devoutly religious, within any specific religion, have no true respect for the ultimate vastness that is God.”
That was surely some kind of an answer, and there was just no way that I could come up with any kind of a reply to it.
And the subject never came up again.
We rode on to where those steep, jagged brown mountains started to slope up, and by then it was getting along toward evening. There wasn’t any water here, but we’d had plenty most every day on the trek so far and were well supplied. So Rostov decided this would be as good a place as any to camp.
The outriding cossacks, the herd-riding cowboys and the cattle were strung out on the big plain of grass about a mile behind us. By the time they got up to us on the rising slope, Rostov and I had scouted the top of the mountain and beyond.
Shad and the Slash-Diamond hands started to settle down near a large rock only about seventy feet away. Rostov’s men were building their camp near where he and I were sitting our horses. That was a friendly, near distance, considering there was no water to share, or anything like that.
The day was close to over, and I was about to take off when Rostov said in a low, serious voice, “Will you do me a favor, Levi?”
“Sure.” I turned Buck back a little.
He hesitated thoughtfully. “Will you tell Shad, in your own way, that the blood he shed when he cut himself with Yuri’s saber seems to make excellent cement.”
I looked at him for a quiet moment. “If ya’ don’t mind, I’ll tell him in your way.”
And then I walked Buck the little distance to our camp and got Shad aside to tell him privately. When I repeated Rostov’s kind of poetic line about blood and cement, Shad said in a low, fairly hard voice, “So? Tell me a thing, Levi. Do you think I owe him something back, for him sayin’ such a neat goddamned thing?”
“I don’t think he wants anything back, Shad.”
And it was just at that time that Slim and Old Keats spotted the wolves.
They’d just dismounted twenty feet or so away, where some of the others were bringing up wood for a campfire, and they were staring down at the flat plain sloping off below. “Hey!” Slim hollered over to us. “There’s two wolves way off down there!”
And then Shad did the goddamnedest thing. He did to them exactly what Rostov had done to Nick back along the trail. Without seeming to have even been looking, he said, “Three.”
And damned if he, and Rostov before, weren’t right.
We all looked down across the plain, and there was the pack leader of the wolves that had hit us some time back, that giant black bastard with the last half of his tail chewed off. He was far enough away to feel safe. But he’d evidently been circling us ever since that first disastrous attack. He’d probably picked up a rabbit or two along the way, but what he must have been really hoping for was for one of the cows or bulls, or maybe a calf, to get separated from the main herd so he could nail it and have a big supper for the whole pack.
The whole pack, what was left of it, consisted of one slightly smaller brown bitch and an about one-fourth-grown little wolf cub.
Seeing them out there on the plain, I could understand why most people had seen two wolves, and only Shad and Rostov had seen three. That little cub, lagging timidly behind, could have hidden himself with no trouble at all behind the one-half of a remaining tail that the big black still had on his husky butt.
I don’t know why he’d decided to be so bold, but he sure was, just standing there like a kind of a magnificent half-tailed nobleman among wolves, watching us wisely from a few yards beyond the range of a rifle shot.
Shad studied that tough old wolf on the plain far below for a long moment. Then he said, “You were tellin’ me, one time, that Rostov never actually saw anybody do any ropin’.”
“Yeah, he ain’t.”
“Well, hell, since he just said such a nice thing about my blood bein’ cement, let’s show ’im some Montana ropework.”
“Like what?”
“Like catchin’ that big wolf down there.”
“Jesus Christ, boss!” I said. “Don’t you never think a’ nothin’ easy t’ do?”
But he was already swinging back up onto Red. “Hey, Slim!” he called. “How’s your ropin’ arm?”