The commotion of the wee hours hadn’t woken him. Now, he was eating donut crumbs from the oily bag. The disk covering his socket was dusty. His hat was missing. They’d found a camp of sorts abandoned in a box canyon like this one, tracks from there.

“Too bad,” Dan said.

“Should have kept going,” Bowman said.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Got blood on you?”

“I said he was sleeping,” Maul objected. They checked Ella too. Her boots.

Dan turned the bag inside out to pour the crumbs into the flat of his hand. The wind took most. Saul stretched his back on earth again. Dan offered to walk on it, started to pull his boots off. Saul stopped him with one raised hand.

“Looks like sidesaddle,” Bowman said.

“Can’t tell sidesaddle from the tracks,” Dan said.

“Course you can,” Bowman said.

“Your horse is favoring her right front,” Dan said and moved to the mules, fed them green apple peels. They broke apart in the mules’ greedy teeth and fell to the dirt and he picked them up and fed them back to the mouths dirty. He liked the second little gray, and the tallest mule with one strange eye and a beautiful arch of the neck, Arabian somewhere in him. At the creek, the bay drank for a long time and the long neck stretched down and down, the longest neck he’d ever seen, and he called over to Bowman about it, how the bay’s neck was like a giraffe’s, very like the tall mule’s neck.

“Let’s go,” Bowman said.

“I agree with let’s go,” Ella said.

Dan found his hat in the bush. He asked if he’d been sleepwalking. Maul searched for two missing mules, another delay. He was calling for the red jenny, whistling for her, also the first little gray. They checked the camp for refuse. Dan told his first Cowboy Joke:

“This cowboy puts on his old gray hat, rides to town picking his teeth. The townsfolk flock him. His horse hates this part, turns a circle in the dust of Main Street, bucks a little to keep them back. A very bad man has come! they say. He has stolen our money, raped our women.

“Which way did he go? asks the cowboy. What did he look like?

“You know what he looked like! they say.

“The townsfolk point vaguely into the rosy distance,” Dan said. “Mountains, clouds, a bit of smoke rising. There’s many tracks on the road out of town. The whole world out there.”

Maul stopped searching trash while Dan finished.

“How’s a cowboy to know?” Dan said. “The townsfolk are farmers, or wearing these billowing skirts, pantaloons showing underneath and the men peek as fair hands press the billows down. Ha. Dust swirls up their bodies to rosy cheeks fresh in from farmwork, hands filthy from toil, pulling roots and cutting throats, the pigs in the yard.”