The late afternoon found Ben in the company of Hoss in their hotel room—or what passed for one in this peculiar town. Dwarfed by the staggering height of the mountains surrounding it, the incapacious, two-story building was as depreciated as the others in its precinct. The hotel had no proprietor, no long-term boarders, no other guests. Lodging in the same cramped room Adam and Joe had acquired, Hoss and Ben were acutely aware that their family members were the only strangers in Malice.

The room was as derelict as the jailhouse and violently dusty. Some of the dust on the floor had been displaced, shifted, and shoved back by the traffic of their boots. The quilts on both small beds had been removed and then shaken, first by Adam and Little Joe, and then later by Ben and Hoss. Even so, some dust clumps remained, their clingy grime too embedded into the material to be cleaned without washing. Ben was as worried about the state of the blankets as he was the son they were covering.

Little Joe was battered and unresponsive, still lying in the same place and position his father and middle brother had first found him in. Joe had been in the company of the midwife then, a silent woman who had been entrusted to remain with him before his family could arrive. It did not take long for Ben to send the woman on her way, too disturbed by her refusal to speak and her wretched, glowing eyes. When he made the polite request, she looked at him with orbs so dark that they were almost black, nodded, and calmly left the room. He had not seen her since.

It was Hoss who kept being forced to endure her presence, each time she sporadically and unpredictably slipped in and out, her sole purpose for each quick visit to verify that Joe was, indeed, still breathing. It seemed that she, like the trio of elders, were doing nothing more than waiting for Joe to die. The possibility that he could live was simply too outlandish to them to garner any serious thought. But the possibility that he could live was all Ben and Hoss could think about—as unlikely as such a thing seemed.

Little Joe's body was decorated in an array of scratches and bruises, the deep purple patches spread across his upper body declared the existence of at least five broken ribs. His face was terribly swollen, smattered with an array of cuts and discoloration. His closed eyes were the worst to look at; bulbous swelling had left the skin covering them so stretched that it appeared nearly transparent, so oddly pale in comparison to the dark, black discoloration of his forehead and under eyes. Ben knew that broken ribs had their ways of mending without complication, but all too often injuries to the head did not. Joe would either wake up or he would not; he would live, or he would die. To his father, the outcome of each scenario promised pain and grief.

What would happen if Joe did die? What would happen if he lived only to find his oldest brother had been hung? The elders thought the viciousness of his assault declared an intimate rapport with the perpetrator, but to Ben the truth was clear: only unfamiliarity could beget such violence. Only a stranger would have been capable of such maltreatment.

Sitting at Joe's bedside, Ben gently ran his fingertips up and down the length of his son's arm. It was the only area he felt he could touch without causing further harm, the tender caress the only way he felt he could communicate his presence to his comatose son.

Shoulders pressed up against the headboard, Hoss lay on the other bed with his arms and ankles crossed. Ben figured his middle son looked as tired and dejected as he himself felt.

"Did you talk to those men again?" Hoss asked.

"Yes," Ben said.

"What did they say?"

"Nothing more than they said before."

Lips forming a bitter scowl, Hoss nodded. "Adam and Joe arrived exhausted and bickering," he recited. "They collected their pay for the cattle that survived the trip and then hunkered down in here for the night. Nobody saw them again until morning. No one heard anything out of the ordinary; nothing seemed wrong until morning came and they found Adam walking the thoroughfare with his knuckles busted up and his hands covered in blood." He shook his head disgustedly. "I'm sure I don't got to tell you there's about a million things wrong with the so-called-truth we've been told."

Ben didn't need Hoss to tell him that. Opening his mouth, he requested he tell him something else. "What do you think really happened?"

"After traveling the road that led them here, and knowin' how they both can be, Adam and Joe had to have showed up in town exhausted and bickering, at least that part of the story seems true. It's the rest that's… bothersome."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Everything." Tilting his head, Hoss grimaced painfully. "Man, I hate to think of how hard Adam and Joe had it on the trip up here. How awful it must have been to finally get what was left of the cattle up here, only to find that there wasn't a bar they could have a drink in or even a place where they could take a bath." Uncrossing his arms, he lifted his hands, indicating their squalid lodgings. "All that was waiting for them was this and the fight that led to Joe being stuck in that bed and Adam stuck in that jail cell." He grew thoughtful, his pained expression enduring. "You know, Pa, Adam has scratches on his hands and arms, and Little Joe had skin lodged beneath his fingernails, but neither of them things bother me as much as something else does."

"What's that?"

"Where's the cattle they brought? They may have lost a lot of them cows coming up here, but you can't butcher what they did arrive with this fast. And even if they had been butchered, where's the meat? Where's the folks who cut it up? Or the ones who were needing it in the first place?" Hoss nodded between his brothers' saddlebags which were hung off the headboards at the end of the respective beds. "And where is the money this town supposedly paid Adam and Joe for the stock? I searched their saddlebags. They're as empty as this town. Those bags ain't just missing that money, there's nothing else in them either. They've been cleaned out."

"You think this is about money," Ben deduced. "That someone in this town attacked Joe and then framed Adam."

Hoss's expression became grim. "I'm not sure I really know what any of this is about," he admitted. "I'm not even sure I know how it's all going to turn out in the end, but I do know something's very wrong here. I think that maybe Adam and Joe might have known that, too. If only Joe could open his eyes and explain then maybe we'd know what. If only Adam would open his mouth and say something other than what he has been, then maybe we'd know, too." He cast his father a questioning glance. "Did you see him after speaking to those men?"

"Yes," Ben said.

"And?"

"He didn't say anything that would be of help."

"What did he say?"

Hesitating, Ben's attention shifted to Joe; he was suddenly uncertain he wanted to disclose his oldest son's request for fear that his middle one would abide by it.

"Pa," Hoss prompted, proving his father's silence as the thing he could not abide.

"He wants us to leave," Ben quietly admitted. "He wants us to take Joe and leave him here."

Hoss's reaction was fierce and immediate. "We can't do that."

"I know."

"I won't do that. When we leave, Adam is coming with us. I don't care if I have to break down the bars of that jail myself."

"What if he won't go? He's seems pretty set on remaining where he is."

"I don't care what he's set on doin'. He's not staying here, and he sure ain't gonna be hanged. I will fight every one of them old men and anyone else I have to. Nobody's gonna kill my older brother for something he didn't do. If the folks in this town are gonna try to kill my brothers, then they're going to have to try to kill me, too."

Smiling weakly at Hoss's determination, Ben ignored what they had both carefully left unsaid. There would be no easy or quick exit from the town. There was more than eighty miles of narrow and cavernous road keeping them here. It had claimed the lives of numerous Ponderosa stock, forcing Hoss and Ben to traverse around their bodies during their own perilous trek. That road—if one could even call it that—had taken the lives of so many. Ben had no intention of giving it another.

It was an impossible situation. A heart wrenching thing to examine and consider. Removing Joe from the town in his delicate condition would kill him, but if Adam remained here he would surely die. They could break Adam out of jail, but then what? One of them would be forced to leave with him while the other stayed behind with Joe. The only thing worse than thinking about leaving this town was being forced to stay in it under such circumstances. There was no predicting what the town elders would decree be done to those who remained.

"There's something else that I still can't figure," Hoss said, his blue eyes uneasy.

"What's that?" Ben asked, grateful for the distraction.

"In a town this isolated, derelict, and empty, with no general store or bank or even a bonafide lawman to speak of, how did they send us the telegraph to request stock? Montana territory is a lot closer than Nevada; they got ranches and they got cattle, and so does the land further south in this territory as a matter of fact. Why didn't these folks ask them for beef stock? Why did they ask us? How did they know who we were in the first place?"

The questions were startling and stomach turning, awakening inside of Ben's heart a flicker of dread. He did not know how to answer any of them. But he knew Joe could not leave the town. He knew Adam could not remain in it. And he knew it seemed downright impossible to save them both.