When evening threatens, the sun has a way of dragging the clouds down and murdering them in blood behind the Westward crags. Yule awoke beneath that sort of sky, having slept the whole day through after hearing Misty’s tale. Blood was the general atmosphere, throbbing spitefully in his temples and eye-sockets. His whiskey had all been sweated-out during the siesta, and remaining inside him was entirely too-much undiluted blood. He pawed around – but the bottle was not close-at-hand. Dude panted at his bedside.

“Do please forgive me,” Yule apologized, and Dude tilted his head. “Your master did not mean to sleep so long. We shall void your bladder without further delay.”

Man and dog alike went down the stairs on all-fours. Yule found the bottle and his boots beside each other in the workshop. After a slug he was more substantial and knotted a length of cord about Dude's neck. Then they went out into the road.

Though a day-and-a-half had passed, the burro which had delivered Madame's boy was still hitched outside Yule’s shop.

Dude led him to the crossroads and thereupon paused to piss. Their customary route was straight ahead along the main thoroughfare, out of camp toward the scrub and pinyon. The other way was the road taken rarely, up toward where it ended at Rex Westman's palisade. Between here and there was the home-office of the camp's doctor, Emil Sanders. Yule knew him only too well from the coffin-trade. The very epitome of equine majesty was tethered outside the doctor's office with its neck bowed to snipe from a bale of hay.

“Appaloosa,” Yule whispered, repeating what Misty had called the breed. The horse's coat was predominately white, mottled in dark spots around the eyes and haunches like the inverse of a night's sky. The muscles layered upon its flanks and forelegs twitched the way sparks of sunlight dance on rippling water. The animal was unlike any other. It put the paint colt Yule kept penned behind his workshop to shame, and it lent disquieting credence to Misty's insane story.

The slug of whiskey in Yule’s gut was suddenly lonely.

Would it be better or worse if the girl were loco? He didn’t want to believe the tale she’d told. Would it be better if she’d conjured the heathens and their plague from her own imagination? He couldn’t rightly say. Perhaps she was simply out for attention, or coping with her factual by creating alternate realities. After an adolescence of forced prostitution the girl had earned some quirks. He could look past that. Or maybe, if Yule was lucky, maybe Misty was simply taking the piss out of him. That was the best case. They’d share a laugh at his expense and forget all about that dead boy who had walked the thoroughfare and et of himself. So much can be forgotten amidst laughter and drink.

Dude pulled at the end of his rope, hellbent on making way toward his well-marked territory, but Yule dragged him toward the Doc's place and explained, “I've a thing-or-two to ask the quack.”

In the High Country, God hurt men in all ways imaginable and did so from sun-up-till-sun-down. Under cloak of night, He did so with even greater enthusiasm. Those who acknowledged the call of healing thereby pledged to answer at all hours. A flock of weary, coughing, rag-bandaged accidents assembled itself at the doctor's stoop and never seemed to thin. He would emerge from the cabin, gray and greasy-sleek – a bespectacled, squinting otter. Triage took place in the dirt outside. Some of the injured were set in splints, or plucked of their buckshot one round pellet at a time. They were sent on their way with ether-in-hand. Others were brought inside and took up residency in the attached, canvas pavilion till they overcame their ills and could check out. Yule knew the broken sometimes took up terminal residency, and eventually the call went out for a pine box. He and Dude took their place at the end of the miserable queue. As they waited, the sun set and the town's torches were lit to force commerce upon the night.

“I have no time to treat your animals,” the doctor spat first thing upon opening his door. He fidgeted with his spectacles and squinted down his nose at Dude. His fingers waded through his stringy, silver hair, sweeping it clear from his creased brow. He wore a mucked-up butcher’s smock which covered him from breast-to-ankle.

“That's fine and I came not to ask it.” Sherwin laughed off the doctor’s piss-poor welcome and stroked Dude's crown.

“What then?”

“Do forgive, but I come seeking some consult regarding a girl called Misty.” Yule patted his pocket, but he had not packed his flask. “A saloon girl at the Bare – do you know her?”

“Reckon I do.” The Doc scratched his bristles and said, “I know most whores about camp – they are some of the most religious in their infections and are often first-to-be-injured.”

“And this girl Misty, she says ye have been knowing her awhile – that ye and Rex Westman's Company found her at a young age in the Oregon Territory. That a fact you recall?”

“Aye-yup, I do.” Tilting his head the way Dude might, the doctor asked, “you gonna get to your fuckin' point?”

Yule leaned in near the old man and whispered, “Then she really was found amongst the heathens?”

Doc drew back and frowned. Nostrils flaring, he stared hard at Yule and crossed his arms upon his smeared butcher's smock. All of a sudden, Yule didn’t recognize this red-faced old man. He wasn’t the same feller to whom he routinely delivered coffins. The mad doctor gritted his teeth and demanded, “What the fuck're you talkin' 'bout, mister?”

“The girl, she says—” Yule was gut-punched by the doctor's intensity. “She says you found her after she was took-in by a tribe of heathens, but then they all caught a foul sick and—”

“Our company found that girl mostly wrung-out by her fever, right-about dead and unaccompanied. No heathens nor cannibals nor whatever else she told you. Cotton what I say? Will there be anything else? There are some wounded here for whom I bear actual concern.”

“No sir, thank you and Godspeed,” Yule answered, and he scooted off with his tail tucked.

The doctor hollered behind him, “I don't have all night! Who's next?”

A mess of puke percolated in Yule's gut. He and Dude quickened their pace back to the crossroads and then marched out beyond the edge of town. Night had never fallen more densely than it did right then, as the tendrils of conspiracy slithered inside Yule Sherwin. His ears burned. The doctor's words echoed, enunciated in hot pulses of blood:

“No heathens nor cannibals nor whatever else she told you,” the doctor had said.

Dude hunkered down and did his business, and Yule said to him, “That old quack is a goddamned liar! Did I utter a word about cannibals? No! Yet you heard him – denying their existence without provocation. Something's amiss, and he's privy to more than he did tell. You can stake a claim on that.”

Worse than the lies, though, were the implications arisen. Suddenly, Misty's cannibal heathens crept from the realm of the unreal toward a place more plausible. Madame's boy haunted his mind, and the ambient whispers of Mother Nature adopted a more sinister air. Was there a hollow, hungry groan out there in the woods? What sort of limbs were rustling out yonder?

“Restless pines,” he assured himself.

The walk home was a gauntlet. He was stalked by the shadows. His own shaky breath sounded foreign in his ears. No amount of gravel underfoot could keep Yule's spirits from sinking. He vacillated between terror and dismal rage – and he held the doctor accountable for both. That fucking quack. It was a truism – deceit had long struck a sour chord with Yule Sherwin. He would have knocked down the doctor's door right then, if visions of the scalped boy weren't chasing him home. To spook away the creeps he conversed with his dog and took solace in the fury of his own voice.

“Do I curry lies by some defect of my nature?” Yule asked. “I'm honorable enough. My word is bond. Is it because I don't wear a gun-belt? Do none of these scoundrels know respect without fear? They ought know, Dude – I am apt to summon a terrible, righteous wrath.”

Coming back to the town proper, the torches diffused some of the darkness but none of his gloom. Though his mouth watered for whiskey, Yule felt a grudge against the joyful noise of the bordello. What gave them the right to whimsy? Panhandlers outside the bordello pleaded for tit-money with their pockets turned-out. A rustler on his way inside spat a dark spew of tobacco-juice into a beggar's cupped palm and howled. The beggar wiped the mess on his shirt and wept, drowning in his piss-poor luck.

“These are our neighbors,” Yule said.

Up yonder, the burro honked outside his shop. The cyclops had finally come to reclaim his ass. He slapped it on the rump and the beast blurt out its distress. Dude growled and raised his hackles. In the sallow torchlight, Yule glimpsed a dark glistening on the burro's hindquarter – where Madame's boy had taken a mouthful the night prior.

“Why don't you get a move on?” The cyclops shouted at the ass. He raised his hand, threatening to strike it again where it was tender from the bite-wound.

“Hey mister!” Yule snarled. “You might find better luck if you first untied the animal.”

The cyclops swayed, drunk as any dedicated villain ought be. Blinking and rubbing his eye, he looked right through Yule.

“Your burro is still tethered at the post here, you see?” Yule took hold of the ass's reigns. He tugged at the rope to illustrate how it was still knotted on the post. The cyclops moseyed closer to have a better look, and Dude rumbled.

“You keep that mongrel back or I'll put 'im down,” the cyclops said. He thumbed the snap on his holster and kept his hand there on his right hip.

“You will not.”

“You just keep 'im back.” He took hold of the reins but Yule would not release the rope. The showdown had come upon him abruptly but he wasn't backing down. The cyclops tilted his head and grinned. He said, “you wantin' for trouble, mister?”

“Mayhap.”

“Well you just make your move.”

When luck allows for longevity, lovers sometimes grow to look alike. So it was with Yule Sherwin's hands, which had come to resemble blocks of oak – chiseled over the course of his long affair with carpentry. Yule dropped the rope and Dude's leash. He drew back his fist and struck a blow upside the cyclops's cheekbone, just below the patch obscuring his bad eye – where he never saw it coming. He went slack something fast and slumped against the burro's rump. Before he could tumble into the ass's accumulated defecate, Yule caught him under the armpits. The cyclops snored, rich and throaty as a man choking on a wad of meat.

Across the road, one of the panhandlers whooped.

“I could go another round,” Yule threatened.

“Didn't mean nothin' by it,” the beggar apologized. “The fisticuffs were fair enough, far as I can reckon. Have ye a merry night.”

The cyclops was coming to, groaning and shaking his head to loosen the cobwebs.

“Aww shit. Fuck. Fire,” he muttered. As he became more-conscious, he was somehow less-steady on his feet.

“Shut up,” Yule said. Dude whined.

“Please, Deputy,” the cyclops begged. “Don't send me back there!”

“You think I’m the law?”

And if he were? Yule wondered. Why, he'd be granted the right of interrogation, of course – and shouldn't the cyclops's role in the murder of Madame's boy be investigated? Not to mention the scalped youth’s subsequent second-coming? What might the cyclops reveal about Misty’s tale? Why, he might answer a whole slew of festering riddles – if Yule were the law.

“Ain't you?” They met eye-to-eyes and then Yule stretched around and snatched the cyclops's pistol from his belt.

“Fuckin' right I am,” he lied. He pointed the pistol at the cyclops and barked, “get inside the lock-up.”

He commanded his piss-drunk prisoner by threats alone, shoving him at gun-point till they were inside the unlit showroom. He marched the cyclops through the door to the workshop. Panic needled, and Yule’s nerve wavered same as the pistol. Abducting one of Rex Westman's boys was tying one's own noose, for certain. What did he expect to glean from the grotesque, anyway? This was the rash recourse of misplaced angst, rightfully directed at Doc Sanders. Not that it mattered any more. Yule and the cyclops had already hurtled past the point of no return. This interrogation was going to happen and it was imperative Yule commit to playing the role of the law. He clenched his jaw so his teeth would not chatter.

Scraps of wood littered the workshop’s floor. The cyclops stumbled and fell amidst the bi-products of Yule’s trade. Saw-dust blew up into both men’s nostrils.

“What sorta lock-up is this?”

“Shut up.” Yule did his damnedest to sound mean but he heard the doubt in his own voice. “On your feet.”

The cyclops tried to rise but it was futile. He went down even harder the second time. Some incomplete piece of carpentry went over, too, and Yule was thankful for the pitch black inside the workshop then – thankful he was made to suffer only the sound and not the sight of his work’s destruction. The cyclops stayed down, and he wept.

“Please forgive me.” He snorted and swallowed a wad of miserable snot. “I'm havin' trouble all over. I can't get up. Confound it! I been so dizzy since he burnt out mine eye.”

“Burnt out thine eye?” Yule coughed and felt in the shadows for his whiskey. As much as he had a need to imbibe, he also had a sudden want to share it with the cyclops.

“I shouldna said that.”

“Who burnt out thine eye?” Yule asked. “Was it Westman? And how so? With a heated brand?”

But with his breaths whistling in-and-out too quickly to be caught, the cyclops could neither confirm nor deny Yule’s theory.

And Yule didn’t want to ask again. He hadn’t really meant to ask the first time, and just briefly describing the torturous act had rendered him queasy in a way he knew not even whiskey could cure. Still, Yule could suss no better remedy. At long last he found the bottle where he’d left it – atop his workbench.

He set the pistol aside. He twisted off the cap. In his mind's eye – that cruel and delicious stage of the imagination – he saw heated metal pressing into the cyclops’s agonized socket. Glowing red, the brand would rupture and cauterize the membrane in a single stroke – like an egg cracked into a hot pan. Sniffling on the floor, the cyclops was suddenly less grotesque. He was a victim; not a villain. Yule gulped a mouthful of the elixir. He exhaled, a new man; a lawman, with a kinder, gentler approach at interrogation.

He asked, “what's your name, feller?”

“Folks call me Sam,” he said, sniffling. “And it weren't no brand, Deputy – it were one of his stinkin’ cigars.”