It is over quickly. If it were Ennis, things might be different but Jack, for all his good-natured bluster, has never been a fighter.
He is watching them through one eye--the other one won't focus properly, and is starting to swell shut. There are four of them, all bigger and younger than he is, and he knows that even when he was lean and strong and twenty he wouldn't have been able to take them. Middle-aged now, with the beginnings of a paunch and old knee injuries that pain him even when it isn't raining, there is no chance.
"Faggot," mutters the one with curly red hair, and spits on him. Jack closes his eyes. He should be praying, a last-ditch grasp for salvation from a God he has never really trusted, but it isn't even that surprising that the last thing that flashes through his mind is a sense memory of calloused hands, and the clean, cold smell of the air on Brokeback Mountain.