Garland weren't liable to bother _him_.

After this the conversation dropped. The stifling heat, the whirling dust
clouds broken by whiffs of air, dry as from a kiln and impregnated with
the pungent scent of the tarweed, made the men drowsy. Jim Bailey nodded,
the reins drawing slack between his fingers. Leonard slipped the rifle
from his knees to the floor and relaxed against the back of the seat.
Through half-shut lids he watched the whitened crests of the Sierra
brushed on the turquoise sky.

The horses clattered down a gulley and galloped across a wooden bridge
that spanned a dead watercourse. The ascent was steep and they took it
at a rush, backs humped, necks stretched, hoofs clattering among
loosened stones.

A sudden breeze carried their dust ahead, and for a moment the prospect
was obscured, the trees that filled the gulley, bunched at the summit
into a thicket, just discernible in foggy outline. The horses had gained
the level, Jim Bailey, who knew the road in his sleep, had cheered them
with a familiar chirrup, when the leaders stopped, recoiling in a clatter
of slackened harness on the wheelers. The stage came to a halt so violent
that Jim Bailey lurched forward against the splashboard, the reins jerked
out of his hands. He did not know what had happened, could see nothing
but the horses' backs, jammed together, lines and traces slapping about
their flanks.

Afterward, describing it at Mormons Landing, he laid it all to the dust.
In that first moment of surprise he hadn't made out the men, and anyway
who'd have expected it--on the open road in the full of the afternoon?
You couldn't put any blame on him, sprawled on his knees, the whole thing