The whole situation felt wrong. All their lives, Eli had been the healthy one. If one of them was going to get sick, it would be Ezra. He could recall times when he had been ill, down with a fever or the flu or a terrible cold, and Eli would do the chores for both of them without complaint. When he came in from milking the cows on a frigid morning, Eli would shuck his coat and hat and boots and look in to see if Ezra needed anything. Ezra would say he was just fine, because there was always a puzzled look on Eli’s face. Not angry or contemptuous or frustrated with Ezra’s illness, just puzzled, like he couldn’t figure out what it was to be sick. Ezra knew that, deep inside, Eli saw every illness as a sign of weakness, proof that a fellow wasn’t as tough or as strong as he needed to be. He never got sick, so why should anyone else? Ezra understood why Eli had kept pushing to make it back to the ranch house. He didn’t know any other way. Even when they were boys, Ezra could never beat Eli in a fight, because to beat him, you’d have to kill him. Now Eli had whipped himself, kept at it until he was shattered like window glass in a dust storm. Even so, it was just like the man to stay alive by burning up a Cadillac to keep warm when another fellow would have just curled up and died.

Ezra leaned toward the Slovenians up front. “How much farther?”

One of them turned and held up all his fingers. “Ten miles more. If we don’t crash ambulance.”

They both laughed. Ezra laughed with them. It was what happened if you spent a lot of time around death and dying. You laughed or you died.

When they pulled up to the back entrance of the hospital, Ezra went to help with the stretcher, but the Slovenians shouldered him out of the way, toted Eli inside almost without effort. Nurses bustled, doctors popped in and popped out again, telephones rang somewhere. Ezra waited ten long hours before Doc Miller stepped out of the operating room to give him the news. There were so many injuries that Ezra could recall only about half of them. Eli had a badly fractured tibia, a fractured collarbone and dislocated shoulder, three broken ribs, a ruptured spleen.

“He’s a tough old bird,” Doc Miller said, “but he’s been through a lot, with the hypothermia and all, and he isn’t a spring chicken anymore. We set the broken leg and removed his spleen. That will take care of the worst of it, but he’s not out of danger. If he’s with us tomorrow morning, he’s got a better shot, but we still have to worry about infections and pneumonia.”