The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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’donce 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