Tom went at the knots, his hands shaking in fury so that he gave up and used a knife on them. When he had the rope off, he gathered it up and went back down the canyon to where Sisson was awake and watching. Tom threw the rope, now in four sections, at Sisson. “You do not tie up my brother like a steer, goddamn it.”

Sisson looked at the pieces of rope littered at his feet. “We need sleep,” he said. “We're not going to get it if we're worrying that John is going to wake up and rabbit on us. It's for his own good. Ours, too.”

“There ain't no good a rope can do a man. A man puts a rope on any other man, it's a bad thing. You ain't going to do it to John or me. There are enough men trying to put ropes on us. And as many as I can send are going to hell for their trouble. Don't be one of them.”

Sisson shook his head as if trying to shake the nonsense off this exchange with Tom. “No harm was meant. No harm was done. We're in this together. If you boys get hanged, so do I. I tied him so we could get some sleep and so's he wouldn't hurt himself. I was looking out for all of us.”

“From now on, you look out for your own self. I'll look out for me and John. It needn't be your bother.”

“It's all my bother. I didn't choose it, but it is. If we're going to get sleep, we got to get somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

Sisson nodded toward the top of the canyon. “They come after us, and they're going to, they'll come through the canyon. We need to be up there.”

“No water up there,” Tom said. “Ain't a lot of cover, either.”

“There's rock and there's height. When the shooting starts, I want to be shooting down, not up. Up is a hard shot. We can stay together, watch the canyon and John while the other sleeps.”

“That might be a way to go.”

“Not ‘a way,’ ‘the way.’”

Tom said nothing, just stared at Sisson as though trying to figure whether to shoot him. He nodded and got up, ready to go get John and get started up the canyon wall to the top.

They had to move back the way they came to where the walls of the canyon were not so steep. But John was nearly dead weight to be hauled up with them. He could manage for a few minutes on his own, then, despite the exertion, he would fall asleep, stumbling blindly forward, sometimes backward, and Tom, walking behind him, would have to prod him forward and awake. Sisson, in the lead, scouted the easiest route, but with a man sleepwalking, no route was easy.

“This would be easier if we could rope him between us,” Sisson said.