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closes in on poor, wounded Thomas. I study the gunman’s face, hatchetlike and cruel, and my stomach turns.
    Why can’t I remember that face?
    The man lifts his cane-rifle and levels it at Thomas. “Yes, and soon you won’t be anything at all.”
    Thomas is doomed …
    Except for that marvelous girl.

5
    FLIGHT BY SNOW
    T he slug ripped through my collar, grazed my neck, and punched a hole in my rucksack. It should have killed me, that shot … but the gunman’s horse had spooked. As I fell from the coach, I saw with strange clarity the muddy stone that had smacked the neck of the rearing horse. The gunman dropped his lantern in a vain attempt to catch himself, but he fell all the same, along with that plunging light. The gunman, the lantern, and I struck the earth simultaneously. The lamp went black.
    I sat panting in the darkness as my foe shouted and cursed.
    Then came a whispered voice some distance behind me. “Thomas! Come on!” It was Anna.
    The gunman hushed, listening.
    I held my breath and climbed to my feet.
    “I can hear you,” he warned. A click told of another shell settling into the chamber.
    Turning, I ran, arms outstretched. Ten paces carried me away from the gunman, but then the ground dropped out from under me, and I sprawled in a ditch. Breath burst from my lungs, and the noise was answered by the rifle’s report. The bullet struck a nearby rock and ricocheted into the night. I breathed more easily after that. It would take him a few moments to fit another shell, and by then, I’d be away in
the dark. I scrambled up the far bank and staggered on, even hazarding a call, “Anna? Anna, where are you?”
    “Here,” came the reply, up and to the right.
    I followed the sound, stumbling over loose stones to reach her. “That was a nice throw.”
    “Father taught me to throw like a boy,” she whispered.
    “Marvelous,” came Silence’s voice, nearby.
    I blinked, trying to clear the afterimage of the lantern from my eyes. “What now?”
    Anna sighed tightly. “We climb. There’s a path away to the left, rocky steps upward. I saw it before the lantern broke. If only there was a moon tonight.”
    I craned to see a sky cluttered with stars. Arcturus hung within a U-shaped mountain pass overhead. “The moon is rising now in the east—beyond that ridgeline. The higher we climb, the sooner we’ll be in the light.”
    Anna tapped a stick on the ground. “I’ll lead the way.” She headed up the slope, and her blue skirt showed gray in the starlight. She would be our beacon. I levered Silence up from the ground and braced him as we both found our balance.
    We were in this now and no mistake—Silence and Anna and I hunted by a gunman. Surely he could hear our struggling steps. Surely he was following, wanting to get as close as possible before squeezing off his next shot.
     
    WE CLIMBED, we crawled, we scrambled through stands of pine and then through a whole forest of them. For minutes at a time, we lost sight of the mountain pass above, and we had no way to know where our pursuer was below. I wished he would make a sound so we could know whether he was half a mile behind or half a yard.
    We had just cleared the forest and staggered out onto a
snowy slope when Silence whispered breathlessly, “I have to rest.” He slumped to the ground and wheezed.
    “Just a little farther,” I said. The snowy pass was a quarter mile above us, glowing white under the sickle-shaped moon. “We have to keep moving. The gunman—”
    “There hasn’t been sight or sound of him for an hour,” Silence whispered. Then he called out in a clear voice, “Anna, dear—we’re taking a rest.”
    Above us, Anna wailed, “It’s just a little farther!”
    Silence reached to me. His hand was gray in the moonlight. “Thank you, Thomas. You and Anna—you could’ve left me in the river. You could’ve abandoned me miles ago. But you didn’t.”
    I sat down beside him. Immediately, the snow began to melt into my