“Can’t split now,” Saul said. “Time for splitting and quitting’s done.”

Dan was letting the cabin bake him too.

“You’ll fry yourself,” Ella said. “Just like the other stupid man.”

“I don’t care if I’m like him,” Dan said. “Just another bad man.”

Saul turned slow. Dan backed up but Saul kept coming. Dan fell over a stump and Saul stood over him. He shifted the .270 and butted Dan’s face with it. The patch stayed right in place. Dan turned the other side of his face to Saul.

“The other cheek,” Dan said. “It’s all yours.”

“Shut up,” Saul said. “While I think.”

They followed boot tracks out of the hollow up an eastern creek. Only one pack string now. Four mules, one packhorse. Maul led the string and Ella followed it. Dan rode the yellow horse behind the packhorse carting the blue chair and the little gray with no burden at all. He touched the gray’s rump sometimes with a stick. They cut up above a ravine. The water stayed low, dropped away. Saul led well ahead on the sorrel, a wide space between him and Bowman on the chestnut, the bum leg hung beside the stirrup. The creek was the only sound. No talking. Some law had been passed against it. Smoke lingered in their clothes, metallic on their tongues. Night came.

The sorrel stopped on a high plateau in the rain. Their ponchos were plastic and flapped like capes. The boot tracks turned steeply uphill south. The horses stood in a line beside the sorrel at the plateau’s drop-off. Saul tipped his hat back. He stared up into black. Water drained down his poncho around the sorrel’s rump.

“I love rain,” Bowman said to Saul. “This exactly.”

“You are an odd man,” Saul said. Bowman tipped his hat. His poncho was split in the back to make space.

The chestnut hung his head and Dan watched for complaint but there was none. The plateau was rocky and sloppy. Maul wore no poncho, never did in his life. Ella had only packed four. Maul looked back downhill. There was nothing in the rain, just a beam of light the rain cut across. He gazed back as if in love, as if he’d dropped a poncho somewhere on the trail, as if he’d ever owned a poncho, as if he might find his lost poncho waiting halfway back to the cabin, and he’d say to it, Ah, there, I see you, pluck it up, head on down, split with this party, proceed to the cabin, rest under the porch, gather his six mules to the remaining four, up the ridge, down the Switchbacks, through Elk Valley to the Narrows to the box canyons and Throne Room, down boulder fields and out to the world of feed stores and medical clinics and sidewalks and his trailer to the gooseneck hitch on his truck.