I wasn't all too keen on getting into that black surging water in the middle of the night and swimming to a shore you couldn't even see from where we were.  but when Preacher called the men on deck together and told them about jumping off the ship, I seemed overjoyed compared to some of the others.

"Water's for drinkin'," Steel Arnold said with heavy finality, "not gettin' into."

"Ain't never swam a stroke in m' life," Judd Fry muttered.  "Wouldn't be much good t' anybody if I wuz drowned an' dead."

"This is the way it's gonna be," Preacher said.  "Slim's men'll row our supplies aboard in small boats.  Any man afraid of the water can go with 'em.  But we'll need about every hand we can get t' drive those cattle t' land through the dark."

"Oh, Jesus, boss," Judd complained, "if a feller can't swim...."

"You'll be on horseback, Judd, and your horse can swim," Preacher told him.  "Just don't let Stormchaser's nose or eyes go underwater, and don't let him turn belly-up under you.  Either way, he'll panic and likely kick your head off.  And if you do get unseated, grab ahold of his tail and he'll pull you to shore."

Judd thought about this, frowning sadly.

Old Charlie took off his hat and scratched his head.  "We'd follow you most goddamn anywhere, Preacher, but I doubt if more'n half of us can swim more'n a doggy paddle. The water's ice-cold an' black as hell, and the idea of goin' into it just plain scares me shitless!  Maybe you ain't scared of it, but....." His voice trailed off.

"I know it's spooky."  There was a quiet understanding in Preacher's voice.  "So take a boat, Charlie."

Goldy said flatly, "I don't know about him, but I'm damn well takin' a boat, and that's that."

Preacher nodded slightly.  "No offense taken, Goldy. So be it."

I had a sneaking hunch that Flem already knew the answer to the question he asked Preacher now. "Can you swim, boss?"

Preacher shook his head once. "Nope."

"Well, that's sure good enough for me," Flem said. "I ain't about t' take no boat then if you ain't."  He turned to Judd.  "Hell, we're both at least past due for a bath anyway."

Judd put his hat back on.  "Okay, Preacher," he said unhappily, "I'll go. But I still don't like it."

Bad Eye turned and went over the railing, his back to the rest of us.

Glory Collis called out," "Death an' me can swim like catfish.  We can keep an eye out for Judd an' some a' them who can't."

Tachito was sitting in the chair that Kuznetsov 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 Chaytahn here is a strong swimmer, too."

Chaytahn nodded.

"With luck maybe we can make shore," Polska Joe 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," Preacher said.  "Doubt it'll kill us.  But my guess is it'll be in invigoratin' as hell."

"Now that you got us humans convinced about how much sheer fun this swim's gonna be," Flem 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 Charlie asked.

"We'll use gentle persuasion and fire."

Forty minutes later we were down in the main hold about ready to go.

Following Preacher's orders, half a dozen of Captain Larsen'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 just 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 Flem was right about us getting them to jump to start with.

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-in 2X4s.  All of us, except for Goldy, who'd stood pat about taking a boat, had saddled our best horses and led them through the cattle up to near the sea door.  Even Polska Joe 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.

Old Charlie, wetting his own lips uneasily, said to Polska Joe, "You look as edgy as a whore in church."

Upon occasion Polska Joe 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 12 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 20-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.

Polska Joe swallowed hard.  "How---how deep ya' think it is?"

"Hell," Old Charlie 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," Ike Skidmore 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 Gus," Preacher said.

Gus was one of the great lead steers ever born.  If those longhorns would follow anything it'd 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.

Glory and Judd put a lead halter on Gus, and he came up to the sea door easy enough.  But once he took his first look out, Gus decided that was as far as he was going.

Preacher was looking across the water.  The first of the Star'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," Preacher said.  Then he swung up aboard Buckshot, his big strawberry-roan stallion.  After two months at sea, Buckshot shied under the unfamiliar weight of the shifting deck, but finally got all his legs under him.  Preacher put the noose of his lariat around Gus's neck, leaving plenty of slack in the rope.  Then he spurred Buckshot forward.  But Buckshot wasn't at all interested in going either, and he did a little bucking dance instead, rearing back away from the sea door.  Preacher, who knew horses better than they knew themselves, let Buckshot get away with this.  He not only let him back off, but turned Buckshot around as if 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 Buckshot's eyes so the big stallion couldn't see, and he kept turning Buckshot until they were again aimed at the sea door.  Then Buckshot spurred the turned-around stallion fiercely and let go with a deafening cowboy yell that must have rocked the buildings in Vladivostok.

"Ahhhhhhh-hawwwwwww-YIGH!" he bellowed, and Buckshot flew forward.  That big roan must have sailed twenty feet out of the sea door before gravity took its natural course and Buckshot realized he'd been hornswoggled.  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, Buckshot swimming frantically and the rope around spraddle-legged, defiant Gus's neck tight as a drum.

But tight as the rope was, not one ounce of Gus's two thousand pounds was planning on going anyplace.

"Push the bastard!" Old Charlie yelled, and seven or eight of us crowded around Gus, heaving with all our weight.  I think what turned the tide was Old Charlie's pocketknife.  Along with pushing, Old Charlie stabbed Gus in the ass.  Not where it would do him permanent damage, but it still must have hurt like a sonofabitch.  The big black bull let out a bellow that damnere matched Preacher's cowboy yell and leaped high into the air in the general direction Old Charlie 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 Preacher had thought it would, that kinda broke the ice with the others.

"Look out!" Old Charlie 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 Gus had unintentionally led the way, they couldn't have cared less if they were jumping off Pike's Peak, as long as they were getting out of that hold.  30Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTQB51GzlJ1
We were lucky not to get crushed in that wild mass exit.

And then suddenly, like a snap of the fingers, the stampede stopped in midstream.  Longhorns are kinda 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.

Evidently taking her word about something being wrong up front, the two hundred or so head behind her slammed on their brakes and now wouldn't be budged.

So this is when we used Preacher's "fire."

"Molly!" Flem yelled. "James, Glory! Old Charlie! Stay with me and light those torches.  The rest of you hit the water!"  Eucher and Levi were the first two mounted and out. The horses didn't really like the idea, but so many cattle had dived out by then that it must have started to seem like the natural thing to do.  Tachito's big black didn't argue at all.  Chaytan, Death and Bad Eye went next.  And finally, Polska Joe and Ike Skidmore.  Polska Joe was so scared his hands were shaking even before he saddled up.  

"Polska," Flem said, "stick close t' Bad Eye!" And then they were both gone, in almost one gigantic splash.

I'd already lighted a torch, and we were now lighting others from it.  When we all had one or two torches apiece, we ran to the far side of the hold and started yelling our lungs out and scaring the hell out of the cattle with the flaming torches.  Flem was up by the spotted cow who'd stopped the first stampede.  He picked up her calf and threw it overboard.  She must have been mad about it, but this was no time to argue.  Bawling wildly, she went after her baby like a shot.  And, terrified by our yells and waving torches, the others started to follow.  One mean-looking dun bull lowered his head five feet away to charge right at me, so without thinking about it I burned him a quick, good one on the nose with the torch and, luckily, he changed his mind and charged the other direction instead.

I guess that ocean water must have cooled his nose off pretty darn quick. 

I know damn well that about two minutes later it cooled me off fast.  The rest of the remuda and the pack mules followed the longboats, and when the last big, balky mule got to the sea door, Flem whacked him on the tail with his torch and yelled, "Abandon ship, goddamnit!" And an instant later, they were all gone.

"We're bringin' up the rear, so carry your torches!" Flem said, swinging up onto Tomer, his calico stud.  He went over and when he came up, still holding his torch, he yelled in a strange, choked voice, "Come on in!  The water's great!"

I got aboard Skinny, who was, naturally, a buckskin, and who was as nervous as I was.  But when I pushed him toward the edge, he went right on over, out and down without even looking back.

And great, holy shit was it cold!  It was already kinda cold because we sent our warm jackets on the small boats.  But now ten thousand wet, tiny icicles plunged paralyzingly into every pore of every part of my skin, through shirt and pants and even boots.  It was colder right then than any time I can remember, even including the time Ma and Pa froze to death around me.  Just the shock of it alone was so much I couldn't even try to get my breathing going for a while.  

Flem was a few yards to my right, waving his torch and yelling, steering the cattle in front of us toward the shore.  Looking at me he called, "Yell out, Molly!  Holler!  It'll start your breath goin'!"

"Yowwwwwwwww!" I put all my lungs into it.

"Preacher was right about it bein' refreshin'!" Flem called.

I could yell back by now. "Sure takes your mind off drownin'!"

Old Charlie was on my left, holding his torch high.  All he could manage through clenched teeth was a loud, chattering "Jesus!"

"Steer 'em!" Flem bellowed.  "Keep pushin 'em in!"

And then, in those freezing, heaving black seas, we lost one of the herd.  A mud-colored cow with only one horn was about twenty feet ahead of me.  For no understandable reason, she suddenly turned around towards me and started swimming back in the other direction.  It sounds silly, but for a minute I had the awful feeling that she thought she'd left something behind on the ship.  "Hey!" I yelled, waving the torch toward her. "Back!"

Her eyes were glazed over, and I don't think she was even aware of the torch or my shouts.  She started to go under, but then swimming frantically she raised her nose up among the rough waves for one last pathetic half of a wheezing breath.  And then she sank like a rock.

I dropped my torch and grabbed for her, which was pretty damn stupid, but seemed like a good idea at the time. As the torch sputtered out in the water beside me, I caught one of her soft, water-soaked ears for a brief moment, and then it slipped out of my hand as the cow went down below into the dark, icy sea.

"Leggo!" Flem was already bellowing. "You're pullin' your horse off balance!"

Somehow, cold and frozen and scared like I was, I was damnere ready to cry.  And maybe even did, a little.

The poor damn cow!

I couldn't quite get all of my broken feelings for her in place.  But it was just so sad for her alone and helpless out here in this black, terrifying water.  So damn sad for her to die like that, way off at the end of the world where she sure as hell never asked to come.  To die stunned and frozen, and not understanding it at all, in this unknown place, while she was trying to blindly and so desperately to somehow struggle back home.

We were probably not in the water much more than half an hour, but it seemed closer to a hundred years of Sundays.  Toward the end, up ahead, Death lost his seat on Comet somehow.  But he managed to grab the saddle, and then the mare's tail as she went by, and she pulled him in all right.  Along the way Death didn't have much chance that night to have a speckled bull.  It got its horns caught in a huge wad of seaweed.  And the seaweed came up afterward but the bull didn't.  Tachito's black Lucifer turned over under him and started kicking and thrashing like hell.  But Tachito jus got out of the way and the two of them swam along onto the beach together.

Finally, with both my hands nearly frozen stiff around his reins, Skinny's feet touched ground, and he just walked up through the water to the shore as calmly as if this kind of a cattle drive was an everyday, or every night, experience for him.

We were a little ways away from town here, and Judd Fry, who had been in the first boat, had already got a giant bonfire started on the beach.  There'd been key gear on that first boat to hopefully keep us from freezing solid, including kerosene, and Judd had poured a lot of that over a big pile of driftwood he'd gathered and struck a match to it.  

"Lordy!" Glory stuttered, almost falling off Scout.  "That fire looks like the pot a' gold at the end a' the rainbow!"

As we came ashore, we all headed straight for it.

Except for the sailors bringing more of our supplies from the boats onto the beach, Old Charlie was the only dry one there.  He'd already poured stakes into the ground near the fire and strung a lariat between them to fix a handy rope hitch for our horses. And now he was keeping himself busy handing out dry shirts and britches and socks to us from our gear so we could change into them.  But while he was doing it, he wasn't looking any of us in the eye too much and wasn't saying anything.

He handed Bad Eye's rawhide jacket to him and Bad Eye was just barely thawed out enough to say, "How was that boat trip, Charlie?" Bad Eye had a way of saying things, sometimes, so that you didn't know if they were as mean as they sounded or not.  But Charlie looked like he'd been slapped, and pretty hard at that.

"Well," Bad Eye kept on, "was it tough?"

"In case you didn't know it, Bad Eye," Preacher said quietly, "we needed one man to take the first boat. And, all things considered, I selected Old Charlie."

"Sure," Bad Eye shrugged. "If you say so, boss."

"I wanted someone here t' start settin' things up for the rest of us.  If not him, someone else."  Preacher's tone hardened a little.  "Maybe you."  When Preacher spoke this way, Bad Eye was smart enough not to answer too fast.  He was thinking for some kind of an answer when Flem grinned, buttoning up his dry shirt with still-shaking hands.  

"Hell, I wish it'd been me, boss. Right now my ass is froze damnnere completely off!"

Preacher turned to Old Charlie.  "Break out the bourbon ya' got over there.  If Flem 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 really happened.  It's kind of complicated, but it's honest-to-God true.  Bad Eye had insulted Old Charlie, who was sure as hell feeling bad enough already.  Preacher, knowing the way the youngster felt, had protectively taken his side.  Bad Eye had tried to back down, but his own pride had got in the way and wouldn't let him really back off altogether, or in an easygoing fashion.  That kind of pride Bad Eye had, starting out with needless hurting Old Charlie, was a false pride, and Preacher nailed him for it on the spot.  Bad Eye was caught in a bind, and Preacher came to the rescue of the situation by saying something for everyone's benefit that was kind of funny.  Preacher picked up on that and decided to let it go by saying something back to Flem 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 James 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, Molly," he said, raising his cup to drink with his good right hand.  "There is no parliament, no congress, where the guys--including you---can know each other so completely and well as guys know each other who do hard daily work, sometimes dangerous work, together.  No, not even the classic 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 me right side, at the angle I was standing to it.

"Like what just happened before."  James sipped from his cup again.  "Poor old Bad Eye lost."

"Well, he shouldn't have pushed Old Charlie."

"But don't you see, we all knew he was weaker, for having picked on Old Charlie's weaknesses?"

"Sure. Sort of."

"Gimme a lil' more."  James 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 talkin' to you about the weakness before.   And the strongest man I was thinking about has the greatest weakness."

"Who?"

He said quietly, "Preacher."

"You shouldn't talk about Preacher 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, Molly, 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 Preacher and James had taught me was to always try to calm down, and I did my level best now.  I took a deep breath.  "James, sir, Preacher can do anything!"

James 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, Molly.  But all of us, always and always, find in this world exactly what we set out t' give to it."

I stared back at him, trying to make my eyes like iron spikes too.  "Well, what the hell, then!  Preacher 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 James.

James 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 might 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!" Old Charlie 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 Star started rowing back in the last small boat as Preacher 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 Larsen 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!"30Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNsH9I33HLR

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 Preacher 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 the thought of the problem and had some kind of an answer to it.

"Them as made it'd be sickern' hell," Flem agreed.  "Whatcha got in mind, boss?"

"Fire an' bourbon brought us around, okay," Preacher said, kind of musing.  "We can't build enough fires to warm 'em, 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 likkered up?" Coyote asked.

"Just pleasantly," Flem told him with a small grin. "Not enough t' make any shameful scenes or nothin'.

"Hell," Coyote went on, "we ain't got nowheres near that much bourbon."

"They've got booze in Vladivostok," Preacher said. "We'll roust 'em out and if need be buy every bottle in town."  Then he started telling us what to do.30Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJCs7oTdwxC