37 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick DewittA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Eli goes for a walk through the town with Mayfield’s bookkeeper. They discuss his current assignment—kill Warm for allegedly stealing something—and Eli admits that “it would not surprise me in the least if he was perfectly innocent” (139).
Eli tells the woman that he would like to move out of the small drafty house in Oregon City that he shares with Charlie. The woman would like to see Eli again, and Eli promises that he will return. She ties a piece of blue silk around his arm as a symbol and reminder of this pledge.
The woman returns to the hotel, but Eli wanders around the town by himself a little longer. Beside the yard of a freshly painted house, he finds a crying young girl, who tells Eli that “she had had a bad dream” and that he was in it (142). In the dream, she came to this house to kill a three-legged dog—a dog that is sitting nearby in reality—but in her dream, she and dog became trapped in an ever-growing dark cloud. After the girl walks away, Eli notices that the dog is now dead, having been poisoned (presumably by the girl).
Eli meets Charlie back at the hotel and tells him about the missing pelt. Mayfield makes it clear to Charlie that the Sisters brothers are being blamed for the pelt’s disappearance: One of Mayfield’s trappers claims to have seen Eli with it. Since they cannot return Mayfield’s money, as Eli had given his half to the bookkeeper, they resolve to sneak away from the town, and fight if they have to.
As Eli and Charlie saddle their horses in the stables, the four trappers with guns confront them, saying that they must return the money or die. Charlie offers to have everyone count to three before drawing guns and firing. The trappers agree, but both brothers fire on the count of one and kill all four men. Unfortunately, the stable boy was hiding in the stable loft and saw their trick, so they must kill him too.
The brothers return to the hotel to confront Mayfield. Charlie tells him that the deaths of the trappers and the boy “should rest on your conscience alone” (157) as they had brought him the pelt “in good faith and had nothing to do with its disappearance” (156).
Charlie then beats Mayfield with his pistol until Mayfield reveals the location of his safe. Mayfield finally gives up his safe in exchange for the brothers’ promise not to kill him. From the safe, they take with them $1,800 in paper money and hide $15,000 worth of gold underneath a stove in the hotel’s basement.
Riding out of Mayfield, and heading for San Francisco, Charlie recalls the day their father died. While their parents were arguing, their father hit their mother with an axe handle, breaking her arm. Fearing for his mother’s life, as their father had “edged up next to craziness” (165), Charlie shot him in the chest with a rifle.
In San Francisco, the brothers look for Morris, an employee of the Commodore who will be their go-between. They find the city to be chaotic and notice hundreds of abandoned ships in the harbor. A man explains that the crews left these ships to go searching the nearby rivers for gold: The madness and expense of San Francisco “will envenom your very centre” (175), the man warns, since food and sex workers cost ten times the normal price.
Eli and Charlie visit Morris’s hotel room, but he has already left. According to the hotel manager, he departed four days earlier with a man matching the description of Hermann Warm. The manager also reveals that Morris left behind a diary, but she refuses to give it to the brothers. After Charlie punches her in the stomach, she reluctantly hands it over.
Morris’s journal, which appears in full in the text, reveals that Warm befriended Morris by buying him lunch. He then gave Morris a demonstration of his invention: a liquid formula that illuminates gold when dissolved in water; this chemical would allow someone to prospect in hours what might otherwise take months to accumulate. The journal reveals that the Commodore, who knows all about Warm’s discover, ordered his death after Warm refused to hand his formula over. The journal continues that after Warm asked Morris to join him as a business partner, Morris agreed and defected from the Commodore.
Charlie confirms Morris’s story: The Commodore told him to extract the formula by whatever means necessary. For the first time, Charlie expresses reservations about the Commodore’s orders to torture and murder a man because of his ingenuity.
DeWitt lampoons and undermines the ruggedly heroic stereotypes of cowboys in American mythology. The Sisters brothers have a reputation as masterful and fearless gunslingers—the kind often lauded in fiction that celebrates the supposed honor culture of the Wild West. In reality, however, they do what they must to win and have no particular interest in fighting fair or proving their mettle by gun-drawing speed and skill. For instance, when facing Mayfield’s four trappers, Eli and Charlie immediately resort to this “old trick of ours […] something we were neither ashamed nor proud of” (154). If the West were indeed as rooted in morality and honor, the brothers’ cheap tricks and lies would elicit shame; instead, the novel mocks this cultural sacred cow by having the brothers also butcher the innocent stable boy for hiding to watch the fight, which he assumed would be a noble and chivalric ritual.
Eli and Charlie are not alone in their pragmatic approach to deception. They live in a world where con artistry is commonplace and indeed often necessary for survival. The trappers “play[ed] such a trick on” (147) the brothers first, telling Mayfield that Eli took the pelt. Mayfield tries to deceive the brothers as well, delivering a sentimental and disingenuous speech about how, if allowed to keep some of his fortune, “he might start out anew with an empty heart, and he should take care to fill it up with only proud things” (160). Eli and Charlie fall for it, letting Mayfield keep some of his money—which he promptly spends on pursuing revenge in Oregon City. The Commodore is a master of tricks and concealment: “there is always some cryptic obscurity present in the Commodore’s orders” (197). Morris’s diary reveals that the Commodore lied to Eli and Charlie about Warm—in fact, the Commodore is the thief rather than their target.
Cynicism and suspicion makes meaningful and honest connection difficult. When Mayfield’s bookkeeper gives Eli a piece of silk to remember her, Charlie can only view this innocent gesture with suspicion: “the girl has played a joke on you” (147). Charlie’s doubt continues the theme of sexual competitiveness between the brothers that began with Sally, but Charlie’s reaction also illuminates the drawbacks of universal distrust.
Warm and Morris offer an alternate type of relationship founded on honesty rather than concealment. Warm chooses Morris as a business partner for Morris’s instinctual honesty and inability to deceive: Unlike someone whose “smile immediately drops” (188) because it is not genuine, Morris’s smile “remains on your lips long after you have turned away” (188). Warm reciprocates, telling Morris everything about his discovery. Morris’s description of his rapport with Warm leads Charlie and Eli to question their mission. Warm’s chemical is a metaphor for the riches to be gained from openness: It penetrates through the dirt to the truth underneath.
By Patrick Dewitt
9th-12th Grade Historical Fiction
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