The frozen lake cracked beneath his feet. It provided the break to my meditative trance brought on by disorientation and oneness of sound: nothing but the crunching of snow underfoot for hours. My eyes had only opened in fleeting moments as he walked, creating brief slits to examine how much the moon had traveled above us since we first started moving. 


A fox screamed somewhere in the distance. I always wondered why a fox sounded so much like a woman in despair but then wondered how I figured what a woman in despair would sound like, since most despairing women were silent. If I called back to this fox, would it come to me? My imagination played out the scene in a moment--the way imaginations do, in such a flurried flash of details, smoother than any raconteur: I screamed, the fox ran to me, the man dropped my body in order to retrieve the gun on his back, and I scurried far away beside the tracks of the padded paw prints. It was a dreamy moment. Then I did open my mouth, but the frozen dryness in my throat startled me, and I realized I hadn't used these muscles in hours.


I felt his arms shift beneath me. Was he getting tired? He slid an arm out from under the bend in my knees, and as my feet touched snow, he took his arm out from behind my neck. 


I was able to see the ground now instead of just the vastness of the sky. My eyes burned as they adjusted to the moon dancing off of the snow. I was satisfied to die in such a glorious scene of stillness and white. I turned to face him, my back slightly hunched, body sore from being toted like a sack of grain. 


"Go on," he said, standing tall and straight, hands at his sides. The light bounced from the snow, up to his face, casting shadows under his eyes that made him look haunted. He hadn't looked this way in the firelight of the hotel dining room earlier in the night. He had sat with a warmth about him, with a softness of face that made you want to sit beside him and hear what he was thinking. When I brought him his dinner, he offered very little in the way of meeting eyes, but his voice was kind with every "Thank you, miss. May I have more coffee please, miss?" 


My body began to straighten back into itself, muscles and vertebrae no longer cramped at the mercy of his grip. The distant fox screamed once more. It sounded like it was somewhere behind him. Did we unknowingly pass it along our way? Did it notice us with dreadful awe? My eyes darted over his shoulder towards the sound of the fox, then I turned and looked over my own shoulder towards the icy lake. “Where do you want me to go?” I asked.


He answered me, "I don’t much care.” He paused long enough to breathe in deeply and then gestured behind himself by giving his head a slight diagonal jerk. "There are some things I need to acquire back at the town before I return where I came from, and I can’t be doing it looking over my shoulder for you or any midnight deputy.”


My mind recalled his first look over his shoulder at me--his last, at that. He was bent by a corner table in the dining room. His fine, tweed coat stretched across his shoulders, his waves of dark hair fallen forward. My return to the otherwise empty dining room must have been unexpected, and he hadn't noticed my presence. "Don't worry about that, sir," I had said to him. "Glasses and bottles get broken here most weeks. I'll be sweeping before I turn in for the night." It was then that he turned his head, slightly enough that I could see his face in profile only, a ramble of fire glow and night's shadows. Crouched still, he raised his right hand and slid it under his nose, producing a shining, black-red trail of blood from index finger to wrist. He turned away from me once more. "Sir, are you alright?" I asked. I took a step or two closer to him. He rose from his knees to his feet, and as he turned to face me, I saw the empty body of a man lying on the floor behind him in the dark. 


"You can show me to a room now, miss." In all calmness, he walked beside me and put his blood-marked hand around the upper of my arm, ushering me up the hotel stairs. I was silent as I drew a set of keys from my apron pocket and opened a door to an empty bedroom. He let go of my arm, and I wondered why he did not immediately disappear into this hideout. 


"Go on, miss," he said. I looked at his face but did not move. This time he wrapped his hand around one of mine and pulled me by it, his feet moving. "Stay here," he said, a silhouette in the doorway. He turned and glided back down the stairs. For being such a tall man, he was noiseless. 


From the darkness of the bedroom, through the banister rails, I stared to the dining room below. Fireplace dimming, the man returned to the corner where I had found him crouched. Like a phantom, full of eerie grace, he then seemed to float across the dining room floor, the body of the dead man trailing him like the tail of a cloak. Once the man and body had disappeared through the hotel door, I waited, shackled by the unseen. 


I didn't know how much time had passed when he finally reappeared in the bedroom doorway, alone, a gun slung across his back, and a carpet bag under one arm. "It's time to go, miss," was all he said. His silhouette grew larger as he took a long step towards me and, hand upon arm once more, led me out of the room. 


Out of the hotel, into the night, through the street, across the woods, we walked for at least two hours, until finally, seemingly irritated with the pace at which I kept us, he hoisted me across his arms without a word. 


For the first time since standing on my own again, I allowed myself to look all about: the lake, behind me; the long, wooded way back to town, behind him; on either side of us, endless snow. The fox screamed, possibly closer-by.


“I’d have liked to have carried you about a mile more, but I think here's good as anywhere,” he said. 


My returning stare must have been hateful or stupid, because he felt the need to repeat the situation to me. 


“The way I see it, I need to get back through the town alone, long enough to get what’s mine and pass it by without taking the chance of you alerting anybody." 


It was the first time I realized he didn't plan to kill me--at least, not out right. 


"You're heinous," I told him.


"I don't want your blood on my hands, miss. You can go back home. As soon as I turn to go, you can go right behind. But I will be going at the pace of a man not planning to answer for what he’s done, and that'll give me all the lead I’ll need.”


“You brought me here to die,” I accused. “You feign honor, but I could be in my bed this minute instead of set out to freeze so that you can run from what you’ve done.”


“Or you can follow the tracks, if you’d rather wait here a while,” he continued, without acknowledgment that I had a thought at all.


We stared at each other for several moments, both full of our own resolve. "Alright, then, miss," he said, and turned himself to the woods.


I do not know when he disappeared from my sight, at what point the blackness of him joined the blackness of the trees. The fox is screaming again, nearer to me now than before. The frozen lake cracks beneath my feet.