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which was a couple of men rummaging through my duffle bag. One of them was hatless, his dirty shirt torn out along the shoulder seam. The other guy was wearing my hat pushed far back on his greasy hair. The one in the torn shirt had my good boots clasped under his arm while he squatted down watching his pal poke around inside my bag.
    I yelled, “Hey,” which was probably not the smartest thing I could have done. My legs were tangled in the blanket, and before I could get to my feet both men startled upright, and the one with my hat on his head grabbed up my bag and swung it at me. Something hard inside, probably my dad’s old steel spurs, clipped me on the eyebrow. It wasn’t much of a blow, but I recoiled from it, and then the other one swung out with his hobnail boot and struck me on the side of my neck; all the feeling went out of that side of my body.
    They weren’t toughs—I imagine they were just hobos looking for money or something to eat or trade for money or food. But at that point they could have taken off running with my boots and my bag, leaving me there in my sock feet with nothing but the clothes I was wearing and a thin blanket. I don’t know why they didn’t. But once they started, they just became set on beating the living daylights out of me.
    I had been in fights as a kid, the kind that ended when somebody got a bloody nose, and in the year and a half since I’d left home I’d been in a few drunken fistfights outside rodeo arenas or bars. I could take a hit and throw one, and I was on my way to being what we used to call a scrapper, but I was on the ground and the two of them were standing over me, kicking with their boots. I couldn’t get any leverage to fight back, and one side of my body was nothing but a buzzing numbness. It’s interesting how, in a situation like that, you’re not thinking about anything, not even feeling fear, you’re just trying to protect your soft parts and your head, trying to get out of range of the kicks or grapple with an ankle or a foot to keep the kick from making contact. And your head is too full of the hammering of your own heart, the furious pumping of blood, to have room for feeling much pain.
    Finally I managed to get hold of a boot. It was an army boot from the last war, a trench boot too big for the man’s foot and with the laces missing. When the boot came off in my hands, he lost his balance and went flailing backward and landed on his butt, and as he went down, the other guy tried to grab hold of his windmilling arms to keep him from falling, which gave me a couple of seconds. I scrambled to my feet and barreled into the one still standing and knocked him flat, knocked my hat off his head, and followed him down to the ground and went to pounding on him with my fists. I was in a rage suddenly, the world gone red through the scrim of blood behind my eyes.
    It’s probably a good thing I was already beaten up myself, that I didn’t have the arm strength to put heat behind the punches. This is something I’ve thought about off and on over the years.
    I don’t know how many times I hit him, but at some point the one who had lost his boot got around behind me and struck me on the shoulders and back of the head with a stick of wood or something, hit me two or three times. It didn’t knock me out, nowhere close to it, but it stunned me, and I rocked over and brought up my arms to protect my brains. The one who’d been hitting me helped the other guy to his feet, and the two of them took off staggering down the ravine.
    I yelled something after them, half-articulated and breathless, something childish like “You better run, pally!” which I think I’d learned from the movies.
    I almost stood up, then sat right down again. I looked to make sure they’d left my stuff behind, the boots especially, and the hat, and then I just sat there a while. My mouth was full of blood, there