The old agent grips my arm with more strength than I thought he could possibly have left. “No matter what you hear, keep running. I mean that. If it sounds like the goddamn O.K. Corral up here, you keep running until you reach that bar.”

“There’s only one way I’ll go.”

“How’s that?”

“If you promise to testify.”

His laughter is full of irony. “Boy, if I survive this night, wild horses couldn’t stop me from testifying. Portman gave the order for these sons of bitches to kill us because he thought I was going to testify. Well, now he’s right. If I’m alive, I’ll get to Mississippi. I’ll drag Portman’s ass down from the mountaintop if I have to tear the whole mountain down with him. Marston too. Now, get your ass out of here.”

I get to my knees and look through the trees to the south.

“Don’t come back,” Stone says quietly. “Not with Tiny or the sheriff. After you leave, everybody up here but me is a target. That’s how I want it. The whole thing’ll be over by the time anybody could get here, and if I don’t come out on top, whoever came would die for nothing. If you come back, I’ll shoot you myself.”

I grab his upper arm. “The trial starts in thirty-six hours. You get your ass back to Mississippi. You owe it to Del Payton.”

He nods in the dark. “That I do, Cage. That I do.”

My run to the town is a benumbed nightmare of falls and slides and collisions with trees, an endless march into a killing wind, but I never consider resting. Dwight Stone is offering up his life to cover my escape.

The first gunshot echoes down the valley behind me as the glow of Crested Butte appears like a mirage in the distance. All my instincts say, turn around, go back, and help Stone. But the old soldier’s tone of his last order keeps me going. Over rock. Through snowdrifts. Past a black mirror of a lake. Through thickets, thorns. Plodding forward into the relentless wind, ever forward, until at last I am sliding down a white slope toward a geometric heaven of lights and warmth.

When I reach the level of the buildings, I circle to my right in a broad arc that takes me around to the south entrance of town. Muted television dialogue drifts on the air, and the occasional sound of a car motor rumbles from between the buildings.