Shad shook his head just once. “No.”
“Well, that’s sure good enough for me,” Slim said. “I ain’t about t’ take no boat then if you ain’t.” He turned to Crab. “Hell, we’re both at least a year past due for a bath anyhow.”
Crab put his hat back on. “Okay, Shad,” he said unhappily, “I’ll go. But I still don’t like it.”
Sammy the Kid turned and went over to the railing, his back to the rest of us.
Shiny Joe called out, “Link an’ me can swim like catfish. We can keep an eye out f’r Crab an’ some a’ them who can’t.”
Natcho was sitting in the chair that Yakolev had been using. He looked up now and smiled, his gleaming white teeth brilliant in contrast to his deeply tanned face and blue-black hair. “In Tampico I learned to swim before I could walk. And Chakko here is a strong swimmer too.”
Chakko nodded.
“With luck maybe we can make shore,” Old Keats said. “The thing I’m worried about is the cold. There’s still chunks of ice in that water. And it’s a good three-hundred-yard haul. A man could freeze.”
“I’ll be the first one in, and I’ll let you know if it can be stood,” Shad said. “Doubt it’ll kill us. But my guess is it’ll be invigoratin’ as hell.”
“Now that you got us humans convinced about how much sheer fun this swim is gonna be,” Slim said, “what I’m wonderin’ is, just how’re we gonna convince them longhorns t’ join along with us too?”
“After bein’ cooped up so long, a lot of them’ll likely dive for the first openin’ they get a chance at.”
“An’ the ones that don’t make that choice?” Old Keats asked.
“We’ll use gentle persuasion—and fire.”
Forty minutes later we were down in the main hold about ready to go.
Following Shad’s orders, half a dozen of Captain Barum’s crew were now forcing open an old, unused sea door on this lower deck where we could drive the cattle out from where they were milling and bawling in the big hold. It was only about a five-foot drop from this sea door to the pitching waterline below, so they wouldn’t bang each other up too much jumping out. That is, if Shad was right about us getting them to jump in the first place.
We’d lighted enough lamps to be able to see a little bit in this big, swaying place, and with the cattle now getting nervous, grumbling throatily and bumping each other around restlessly on the heavy plank floor, there were all kinds of funny, deep noises and wild, flickering shadows wherever you looked. Our thirty-horse remuda and the pack mules had made the trip at one end of the hold, separated from the longhorns by a rough partition of nailed-up two-by-fours. All of us, except for Sammy the Kid, who had stood pat about taking a boat, had saddled our best horses and led them through the cattle up to near the sea door. Even Big Yawn had decided to ride ashore. It was the first time I’d ever known him to change his mind. He still looked pretty grim, but I guess most everyone else deciding to go had kind of shamed him into it.
Crab Smith, wetting his own lips uneasily, said to Big Yawn, “You look as edgy as a whore in church.”
Upon occasion Big Yawn did manage to have a way with words. On this occasion he said shortly, “Fuck you and the horse you rode up on.”
The sailors, working with sledges and crowbars, and swearing a lot, now got the rusted sea door sliding with an agonized sound, and it slid all the way it would go, making an opening about twelve feet wide.
And, as the door grated open, looking out at that black, surging ocean just below gave a man one damn fearful feeling. I’d once swam across a twenty-foot-wide pond. But those ugly, dark waters pitching around in that inky night looked like their only use was for men to drown in.
Big Yawn swallowed hard. “How—how deep ya’ think it is?”
“Hell,” Slim said, trying without too much success to be cheerful, “maybe a mile. Maybe only half a mile. Who knows?”
“There’s one thing for sure,” Old Keats said gloomily, “it’s too damn deep t’ wade across.”
A couple of lights farther out from the town could be dimly seen on the shore, but right now they looked about a hundred miles away.
“Bring up Old Fooler,” Shad said.
Old Fooler was one of the great lead steers ever born. If those longhorns would follow anything it would be that huge black ox with one four-foot-long horn raised up normally and the other dipped down. There seemed to be something irresistible about that gigantic butt of his that usually made the others just plain follow it regardless of wherever he went.
Mushy and Rufe put a lead halter on Old Fooler and he came up to the sea door easy enough. But once he took his first look out, Old Fooler decided that was as far as he was going.
Shad was looking across the water. The first of the Queen’s small boats carrying out supplies was already being rowed toward the shore, about two hundred feet from the ship. There was a lantern raised on the boat that gave us a closer light to steer by.
“Get ready t’ push ’im overboard,” Shad said. Then he swung up aboard Red, his big strawberry-roan stallion. After two months at sea, Red shied under the unfamiliar weight on the shifting deck, but finally got all his legs under him. Shad put the noose of his lariat around Old Fooler’s neck, leaving plenty of slack in the rope. Then he spurred Red forward. But Red wasn’t at all interested in going either, and he did a little bucking dance instead, rearing back away from the sea door. Shad, who knew horses better than they knew themselves, let Red get away with this. He not only let him back off, but turned Red around as though they were in agreement and were now going to ride in the other direction. Then, still holding the reins in his left hand, he put his right hand over Red’s eyes so the big stallion couldn’t see, and he kept turning Red until they were again aimed at the sea door. Then Shad spurred the turned-around stallion fiercely and let go with a deafening cowboy yell that must have rocked the buildings in Vladivostok.
“Ahhhhhhh-hawwwww-YIGH!” he bellowed, and Red flew forward. That big roan must have sailed twenty feet out of the sea door before gravity took its natural course and Red realized he’d been double-crossed. But by then it was too late. They both damnere went under in a spray of white foam against the black water, and then they were bobbing up, Red swimming frantically and the rope around spraddle-legged, defiant Old Fooler’s neck tight as a bowstring.
But tight as the rope was, not one ounce of Old Fooler’s two thousand pounds was planning on going anyplace.
“Push the bastard!” Slim yelled, and seven or eight of us crowded around Old Fooler, heaving with all our weight. I think what turned the tables was Slim’s pocketknife. Along with pushing, Slim stabbed Old Fooler in the rear. Not where it would do him permanent damage, but it still must have hurt like hell. The big black bull let out a bellow that damnere matched Shad’s cowboy yell and leaped high into the air in the general direction Slim wanted him to go. And when he came down, he was in the Gulf of Peter the Great, complaining loudly and splashing all over the place.
And, as Shad had thought it would, that kind of broke the ice with the others.
“Look out!” Slim yelled, and we jumped back from the sea door as probably the only stampede of longhorns on a ship ever recorded in naval history began. There must have been three hundred cows and bulls that suddenly realized, after two months of imprisonment, that there was at last a way out. Once Old Fooler had unintentionally led the way, they couldn’t have cared less if they were jumping off Pikes Peak, as long as they were getting out of that hold.
We were lucky not to get crushed in the wild mass exit.
And then suddenly, like a snap of the fingers, the stampede stopped in midstream. Longhorns are sort of like people, I guess. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing either most of the time. A big spotted cow with a yearling calf gave a terrified bawl and skidded to a halt at the sea door.