“Sure.” Dixie shrugged. “If you say so, boss.”
“I wanted someone here t’ start settin’ things up for the rest of us. If not him, somebody else.” Shad’s tone hardened a little. “Maybe you.” When Shad spoke this way, Dixie was smart enough not to answer too fast. He was thinking for some kind of an answer when Slim grinned, buttoning up his dry shirt with still-shaking hands.
“Hell, I wish it’d been me, boss. Right now my ass is froze damnere completely off!”
Shad turned to Sammy. “Break out the bourbon ya’ got over there. If Slim froze his ass off, it’d be the biggest loss our outfit ever suffered.”
There was some easy laughter from all around now, but everybody knew just exactly what had actually happened. It’s kind of complicated, but it’s honest-to-God true. Dixie had insulted Sammy the Kid, who was sure as hell feeling bad enough already. Shad, knowing the way the youngster felt, had protectively taken his side. Dixie had tried to back down, but his own pride had got in his way and wouldn’t let him really back off altogether, or in an easygoing fashion. That kind of pride Dixie had, starting out with needlessly hurting the Kid, was a false pride, and Shad nailed him for it on the spot. Dixie was caught in a bind, and Slim came to the rescue of the situation by saying something for everyone’s benefit that was kind of funny. Shad picked up on that and decided to let it go by saying something back to Slim even funnier, and at the same time getting us the bourbon he’d had brought in on the first boat.
I can guarantee the above is almost exactly accurate, because Old Keats brought it up to me a few minutes later, while we were all drinking tin cups of bourbon, the two of us standing a little apart from the others. “Strange thing, Levi,” he said, raising his cup to drink with his good right hand. “There is no parliament, no congress, where the men can know each other so completely and well as men know each other who do hard daily work, sometimes dangerous work, together. No, not even the classic ancient Greek or Roman Senates.”
“Well, I guess that’s fair enough.” The drink was starting to warm and help my gut the way the fire was helping my right side, at the angle I was standing to it.
“Like what just happened before.” Keats sipped from his cup again. “Poor old Dixie lost.”
“Well, he shouldn’t have pushed Sammy.”
“But don’t you see, we all knew he was weaker, for having picked on Sammy’s weaknesses?”
“Sure. Sort of.”
“Give me a little more.” Keats put out his cup and I poured from a bottle that was near us on a rock near the fire. “That’s damn good,” he said, tasting thoughtfully. “Jack Daniel’s, Distillery No. 1, 1866. Great bourbon.”
I looked at the bottle in the light of the fire and said, “Goddamn! You’re right. You’re a damn good guesser!”
“That wasn’t such a good guess. It was a truth based on knowledge, which in turn was based on many years of happy and often heavy drinking.”
“Oh, t’ hell with you, that’s really somethin’!” Despite still being chilled by the cold, I couldn’t hold back a kind of genuine enthusiasm. “T’ even guess the year you gotta be smarter’n hell!”
He raised his shoulders slightly, dismissing this. “I was talking to you about weakness before. And the strongest man I was thinking about has the greatest weakness.”
“Who?”
He said quietly, “Shad.”
“You shouldn’t talk about Shad an’ bein’ weak in the same breath!” I said angrily.
He gestured with his left hand, raising it as high as he could, to about chest level. “I love the sonofabitch as much as you do, Levi, and I’ve even got a few more years of seniority there than you. But his great strength is what makes his greatest damn weakness. He’s too strong to change his mind. Too strong to see something from someone else’s point of view.”
I had flared up before, but one thing both Shad and Old Keats had taught me was to always try to calm down, and I did my level best now. I took a deep breath. “Old Keats, sir, Shad can do anything!”
Keats took another drink, a long one, and looked at me with eyes as sober as two iron spikes driven into a railroad tie. “This deals with what I told you before about seein’ or not seein’ this giant land.” His bad left hand came up and pointed at me again, in a tough but still friendly gesture. “Sometimes it’s hard t’ know, or to ever properly establish, Levi. But all of us, always and always, find in this world exactly what we set out t’ give to it.”
I stared hard back at him, trying to make my eyes like iron spikes too. “Well, what the hell, then! Shad always gives everything!” My own iron spikes were starting to melt already, because there was no way for me to stay mad for long at Old Keats.
Keats now lowered his eyes for a moment, then nodded. “He always has—up until comin’ here t’ this damn Russia. But he’s got a hate for it that he may get back times ten.” He put his cup down and started rubbing his hands together. “By God, the blood’s startin’ to flow again. We just may live for a while longer, after all.”
“Hey, boss!” Sammy the Kid yelled from off on the other side of the fire where he’d been helping the sailors finish unloading our supplies. “Everything’s ashore!”
The men from the Queen started rowing back in the last small boat as Shad came into the firelight from the side near where the cattle were huddled.
“Good luck!” one of the crewmen shouted, and some of us yelled “So long!” or whatever back. Then, after a silence, another sailor called with a certain warmth in his voice, “Cap’n Barum speaks for all of us! He thinks you’re all daft!”
Since it wasn’t really a tough line, some of us yelled back in a friendly way, “Get a horse!” and “Fuck you!” and things like that.
And then the man’s voice came across the water again, fading in the distance. “He speaks for us! An’ he said if he wasn’t born a sailor, he’d rather be a cowboy!”
It was too late to holler anything back by then, and what he’d yelled was kind of touching anyway, so we just waved by the light of the fire, and then stood around the flaming driftwood, kind of quiet.
And then Shad said thoughtfully, “Been takin’ stock of the cattle, an’ a lot of ’em are too cold from that water t’ make it through the night.”
The way he said that grim thing you could tell he was worried, but that he more than likely already had thought of the problem and had some kind of an answer to it.
“Them ’as made it’d be sicker’n hell,” Slim agreed. “What you got in mind, boss?”
“Fire an’ bourbon brought us around okay,” Shad said, kind of musing. “We can’t build enough fires to warm them, but we can get some booze into ’em. So we’re gonna break out all the grain we brought ashore and make that herd the most potent mash they ever ate in their widely traveled lives.”
“Ya’ mean get ’em drunk?” Mushy asked.
“Just pleasantly,” Slim told him with a small grin. “Not enough t’ make any shameful scenes or nothin’.”
“Hell,” Mushy went on, “we ain’t got nowheres near that much bourbon.”
“They’ve got booze in Vladivostok,” Shad said. “We’ll roust ’em out and if need be buy every bottle in town.” Then he started telling us what to do.
CHAPTER FOUR
A BUNCH of curious Russians who lived on the outskirts of Vladivostok had begun to gather just outside the light of the fire to look us over. While the other hands, working under Slim, started hauling gunny sacks of grain up closer to the fire, four of us went over to talk to them. There was Shad and Old Keats and Shiny Joe and me, and we were leading two pack mules to take on into town.