He felt himself rise through the delirium of his pain at this, like a thick jelly pushing up toward the airborne light just above the surface of the sea. “A girl?” he said. His face felt numb, and there was a warm wetness in his mouth. A hard jagged stone there which he knew must be a broken shard of tooth.

“What’d he say?” someone mumbled. And then, louder: “What’d you say, Jap?”

His voice was a struggle. “A girl? What girl?”

“Shit, Tuck,” a voice said. “He don’t even know. How’s that for it? He don’t even know who he’s got to thank. Boy, you really are up shit creek without a paddle.”

“God,” Ray said now, his heart lurching so hard and heavy that it felt for a moment as if it might break clear from his ribs, not like an arrow but like an egg, its viscous ooze soaking through him and into the grass.

“The old lady paid us,” a voice said calmly, “but it’s the daughter who wants it done.”

“You sons of bitches,” Ray said then. “You goddamn sons of bitches.” He tried to rise then, struggling against them as they came, the rope somehow loose so that his hands were before him and he was swinging in a wide arc and somehow connecting, first one fell and then another and he had to get away, from the men, from the ridge, from the Wilsons, from the whole of the map of his life, and so he spun from the campfire and ran, a staggering, loping figure, maniacal for motion itself and possessed only of that singular thought: to get away, to get away, to get away.

When the shot rang out he did not know what it was, although he had heard so much gunfire in his life, more than anyone had any right to, but not here. His body jerked forward as if it had been shoved from behind, as if some benevolent hand were helping propel him. From somewhere a shouted voice: “No, goddammit!” and already he was falling, for his legs were empty of whatever had moved them, whatever had pushed them on.

In the palm of his hand he could feel it, for he had held it all the while, even during the worst of it, even when the men had tied his hands and beaten him. He had gone down to his knees in the grass and now the grass seemed to pull him into its embrace and he let himself into it, his thumb on the locket, tracing its scalloped shape. When he looked back it was to see four faces outlined against a sky awash with black clouds. He wondered who they might be and thought they might offer some sense of where he was headed but when they spoke he could make no sense of it at all.

—Goddammit, Tuck, you done kilt him.

—He was runnin’.