Others

They came down out of the high country weak and slow, the both of them, and where the road bent along a creek at the mouth of a canyon they found the man.

He was sitting against a guardrail with his legs out in the snow like a doll set down and forgotten, and at first she took him for one of the dead, of which the roadsides had their share, and then he turned his head and looked at them, and she saw he was alive, and she saw in the same instant that he was grown, a man of forty or more, which stopped her in the road as hard as a gun would have. Grown. Alive. Two of them now she had seen, him and Ray, where for years she had believed there were none, and both of them had the same look, the worn-down gray sick look of a candle that has been burning at the very bottom of itself for a long time and has no business still being lit.