The Choctaw stood up and walked around Eli, trying to decide what to do. He thought of lifting him over the saddle on the pinto and tying his hands and feet underneath the horse’s belly, the way you would with a dead man. It would work, but it might kill him. Taking Eli back to his cabin would be worse than useless. He needed to get him to the main house, six miles away, where there was at least a telephone. The only way he could transport him safely was on the travois he had back at the cabin. It was an old-fashioned Indian pony drag, two twenty-foot lengths of crisscrossed lodgepole pine, with a willow frame stretched between them, lashed to the poles with rawhide strips. A wagon might have been better, but he didn’t have a wagon. First, he would have to leave Eli and hurry back for the travois. He took off his sheepskin hat and jacket, covered Eli’s head with the hat, wrapped the jacket around his legs, jumped on the pinto wearing only his shirt and trousers, cursing the cold with every step. The way this was working out, he and Eli would both freeze to death. He had no trouble urging the pinto into a canter. The horse wanted to put distance between itself and that burning car. Two Spuds promised him a bucket of oats if they got Eli back to the ranch house alive, but he could tell the pinto didn’t believe him.

Inside the cabin, he rummaged around, found an old coat of Jenny’s and pulled that on, dragged out his old buffalo robe along with a couple of blankets and two ropes to tie Eli to the pony drag. The coal stove was going good. He was able to warm up a little, just being inside. Jenny was still snoring, a sound like a ripsaw in wet timber. By the time he made it back to the wreck with the travois bouncing along behind him, Eli was unconscious. It was just as well, because it took a good deal of dragging and heaving to get him onto the travois and to get the buffalo robe to fit snugly around his body with the pinto trying to shy away. Two Spuds wrapped his lariat three times around Eli’s torso and the travois poles and tied it with a sheepshank knot to make sure the man didn’t slip off the pony drag.