Eric Roth's 2017 screenplay review
Nov 16, 2023 17:10:19 GMT -5
Post by arnzilla on Nov 16, 2023 17:10:19 GMT -5
“You believe in justice, don’t you Tom?”
“I believe in right and wrong.”
– William Hale & Tom White
Killers of the Flower Moon
Screenplay by Eric Roth
153 pages
February 20, 2017
Both a procedural and a white savior film, this entertaining VERY early draft puts the emphasis on FBI agent Tom White. Mollie, Ernest and Hale have meaty supporting parts.
We start with Ernest and Mollie and all their children, and a full house of friends and relatives. The always reserved Mollie had a prior, abusive husband and has always been suspicious of Ernest, but is taken by his charisma. Ernest pleads his case that he’s a protector, and that makes him invaluable. Mollie believes him to be a truly good man where there aren’t many to find.
Mollie’s tempestuous sister Anna visits and has an altercation with Bryan, Ernest’s brother. Ernest then meets his uncle William Hale, and is always obsequious to him. Anna turns up dead and FBI agent Tom White appears on page 14, rifle over his shoulder, six gun on his hip, looking like a “full Brando cowboy.”
He’s introduced while picking up his lawman brother’s coffin in Texas. He talks to the coffin providing background info about his family and the Bureau. He has a wife and two sons. Then it flashes back to 1905, to the White brothers in their 20s, young Texas Rangers. Then more exposition is provided to the coffin. We learn that Tom’s partners always die and he becomes a loner, self-effacing, quietly emotional, dutiful but with a chip on his shoulder.
Then the action shifts to Anna’s public and extra gruesome autopsy. We flashback to Mollie when she was a young girl, learning about Thomas Jefferson stealing Osage land. Then we get flashbacks within flashbacks describing what eventually brought the Osage to Oklahoma. Then there’s a sequence of young Mollie being told by her father why she has to go away to a White school. We then see her in a Catholic Convent school, experiencing a culture crisis amid racist nuns.
We flash forward to Anna’s funeral and a scene between Mollie & Hale, where the latter describes how he became a wealthy self-made man and promises Mollie that he will hunt down Anna’s killer at all costs.
Mollie’s mother Lizzie dies and Mollie sings spiritually in a teepee. On page 30, Tom White arrives in DC and meets J. Edgar Hoover. The latter’s motive in investigating the Osage murders is that the Bureau had already sent people to Oklahoma before Hoover was in charge and he didn’t want their bungling to reflect poorly on him.
We meet Wren, the Native American partner assigned to White, a man who clearly hates partners. We learn that White’s grandfather got an arrow in his neck from a Comanche and could whistle “Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” through the hole. Then Tom mentions that he has a problem with partners, in case we weren’t aware of it.
We cut back to Mollie, asking her White Guardian for money to offer as a reward for the capture of Anna’s murderers. Mollie reveals that she thanks God that she has Ernest to take care of her. But we cut to Ernest being a spoiled rich kid and wanting more cars. Ernest and Mollie reminisce about when he was her chauffeur. But things get testy when she makes it clear who wears the pants in the family and who holds the purse strings. He feels chastised.
White sets up shop in Oklahoma City and reads a book on Osage history. He meets a few more FBI agents, and after looking through the files and photos, determines to start with Anna’s murder. He sends two men to pose as ranchers to Osage County to check out Hale and also sends an agent to pose as an insurance salesman because they typically can ask a lot of personal questions with impunity.
Hale hires a Pinkerton detective to find Anna’s murderers. Mollie, meanwhile, hires her own private detective whose casual racism pisses her off. Later, he reads a report out loud to Molly, which Ernest overhears. Most witnesses appear to lead to dead ends.
White & Wren are… wait for it… uneasy partners. While Molly appears paranoid to those around her that somebody is out to kill her, Ernest assures her that he’d strangle that person to death. Both detectives give up with nothing to show for it. It’s pretty clear by page 59 that Hale is in on it. Ernest disabuses Molly of the notion of being poisoned and gifts her with a diamond bracelet with three gold women on it: her sisters and mother.
Tom then meets (at a distance) Mollie, Ernest, and Hale at a July 4th parade. At Mollie’s Osage friend William Stepson’s autopsy, Tom finally introduces himself. She mistrusts him immediately. Tom is both Caucasian and from the government. White quotes Sherlock Holmes and starts eliminating suspects. Kelsie Morrison’s name comes up. White’s FBI cohorts use some archaic crime solving methods on him. White does LOTS of detective work on Anna’s murder.
Ernest and Mollie drive home one night to see all the light bulbs strung up on their street. The light protects you from harm, we learn. Then Ernest and Rita’s husband Bill Smith have a tense discussion about the identity of the murderers. Later that night, a bomb goes off under Bill and Rita’s house. White’s hotel room gets rocked.
At first impassive, Mollie shouts “I want to know who killed my sister! My mother and all of my sisters!” White may have caught onto Hale near the deceased Bill Smith’s hospital room. The way Hale says “I’ll pay for his arrangements” appears to irk him.
Molly again complains about being poisoned when the Shoun Brothers show up at her house with the insulin. Molly will have none of it. She grabs a rifle and Ernest overpowers her and pins her down while the brothers give her the injection. They leave and Ernest apologizes and professes his love.
White questions Ernest’s racist Aunt Margaret and Uncle Wayne and knows they’re lying about Bryan’s alibi. They all claimed to be at a play that was actually dark that night. Bryan was last seen with Anna.
Halfway into the screenplay, White asks aloud “If Bryan killed her, what for? Is he involved in the other murders?” No conspiracy… yet. But Bryan goes on the lam.
Mollie’s priest gives the Osage Chief a note from Mollie: “I am being poisoned.” The note gets to White and he pays a visit to the Burkharts, only Ernest isn’t there. He reaches the locked master bedroom door and makes his case, but Mollie won’t even talk to him, let alone open the door. White leaves, but notices her looking at him from the bedroom window.
White questions Hale at a restaurant. He’s sitting with the 2 undercover FBI agents posing as cattlemen… and Ernest. White states that there are “lots of people around here who seemed to have been loved to death.”
White questions the nurse on duty at the hospital before Bill Smith died, then the Shoun brothers. He’s an effective interrogator. On page 94, Bill Smith’s lawyer fingers Hale and Ernest as his two biggest and ONLY enemies.
White asks “Was Ernest in love with Miss Mollie when they got married four years ago? Or was it an opportunity to get at that headright. It’s kind of hard to believe that he went through all of that… share a bed with her… raise children with her… all the while plotting and scheming against her family.”
An indigenous man tries to stab White in his sleep but he gets outsmarted. Cut to a real/imagined scene of Tom White standing over Hale in his pajamas in his bed. White, like a spectral assassin says “you must of forgot to say your prayers… You’re gonna need em.” Then he kisses Hale’s forehead and disappears “like a ghost.”
White pleads before the Tribal Council for cooperation. The Osage Chief says his people may have to take things into their own hands as a last resort. White decides that his evidence sucks and he needs to go into deep outlaw country with his Winchester and his Texan charm to find more evidence. He rides his high horse through the Osage hills with the realization that no Caucasian in Oklahoma would implicate one of their own for the murder of an Indian. So he decides to find the scuzziest and scummiest of sources, hiding in the hills. Back at the office, the FBI team looks at mugshots of various Hale associates and associates of associates and we see their eventual murders. Anyone who could implicate Hale winds up dead or missing.
Hale’s ranch conflagrates while White is in his hotel room. Ernest is on Hale’s porch with him. “Thick as thieves,” White says contemptuously.
White finally meets Mollie in her teepee, but Ernest comes barging in with a gun. Mollie remains passive.
Ernest and Hale get implicated by Burt Lawson, a prison inmate and former ranch hand of Hale. “When Hale says jump, Ernest say how high.” He also calls Ernest a snake in the grass.” Supposedly, Hale and Ernest pick him up in a car after the Bill Smith explosion and drive him back to jail and then the deputy sneaks him back into his cell. White doesn’t quite believe it because Lawson never looks him in the eye, but pressure from Hoover sees him getting arrest warrants for Hale and Ernest.
Ernest gets arrested in a pool hall and a Marshal slams his face against a pool table while handcuffing him. Hale turns himself in at the Fairfax jail.
An FBI agent punches Ernest viciously in the gut, making him puke. As the agent starts to hit him again, White stops him. He also lies to Ernest that Hale gave him up, calling his nephew a “weakling” and “water carrier.” Ernest almost buckles, but sees through it.
White gets dressed down by Hoover for arresting Hale with circumstantial evidence. Hale could prove he received a telegram in Texas at the time of the bombing. He meets with a wheelchair-bound Mollie. “He might be weak, but his heart is true,” Mollie says of her husband. “You can know someone’s heart if it hasn’t turned to stone,” she reiterates. White wheels Mollie into the interrogation room of the Federal building and Ernest puts his head in her lap as she strokes it.
A shackled Blackie Thompson is brought in to great fanfare. “Hale and Burkhart are too much Jew – They want everything for nothing,” he says. He rats them out for the murder of Bill and Rita Smith in exchange for Ernest’s car. Ernest faces Blackie, but still won’t crack. Yet Ernest summons White in the middle of the night to confess. “She’s the one, Mollie, I’m doin’ this for…”
After facing the enormity of his job, White finally says to Wren “I get it. White people in Oklahoma think no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724.” White asks Ernest if he was giving only insulin to Mollie. He doesn’t answer, just stifles a cry. Then White just asks “Why?” Again, no answer.
White goes after Hale in his cell. Hale calls Ernest a coward and a Shakespearean fool and “nobody listens to a fool.” White slyly accuses Hale of impregnating Anna and having her killed. Hale keeps his composure. White counters with “Beware of the fool he speaks the truth, because he doesn’t know any better.”
White goes to visit Mollie’s bedside. She’s at death’s door. He lifts her up and carries her out of the house into a waiting ambulance. White has a doctor from New York come to Oklahoma and run medical tests on Mollie. He suspects strychnine or arsenic. Next up, the Shoun brothers, whom he accuses of attempted murder. White roughly slams one of them up against a wall.
The action shifts to the courtroom on page 133. Ernest takes the stand and Mollie sits in the back to support her husband. An FBI agent asks White “How does she stand by him?” He answers “Love is a curious confusing thing.”
White predicts that Ernest will recant on the stand. Hale’s lawyer bellows that Ernest is HIS client. The judge allows them to confer in his chambers. When Ernest returns to the witness stand, he recants and claims coercion by the FBI. Hale takes the stand and claims that he was likewise tortured by White and his thugs.
But FBI informant Kelsie Morrison takes the stand and details Hale's plan to eradicate Mollie’s family. Mollie sits next to Ernest and sweetly touches his shoulder, “still in love with him.” White feels hopeless about the case.
Cut to White on horseback in the Oklahoma mountains going deer hunting. Wren joins him and they look at the prairie below, discussing whether we can all live together peacefully.
At the funeral of Mollie & Ernest’s daughter, White rides up on a horse and makes a beeline to Mollie. He tells her in Osage that he’s sorry for her great sadness. She replies in Osage that a child is everyone’s sadness. Respectfully, Mollie hands White a shovel. He shovels some dirt onto the coffin and says “this is your land.”
White is supposed to take Ernest back to jail, but the lawman has other ideas. They wind up on the prairie, alone. White tells Ernest he can go… just… take the car… and leave… and suggests Mexico. But he tells Ernest that he needs to decide what kind of man he wants to be. They part. Ernest is free as a bird.
Back at the courtroom, the jury is deadlocked amid allegations of jury tampering. Just then… Ernest appears at the back of the courtroom. He has something to say. He wants to change his plea to guilty. On the stand, he says that he has done most of what he’s accused of. He looks directly at Mollie and says “God forgive me… I attempted to, along with the Shoun Brothers, poison my wife for her inheritance.” Then he turns to Hale and says that he did it all for him. Ernest jumps up and pounces on Hale, bashing his head over and over into the floor.
When things quiet down, Ernest continues to testify while looking straight at Mollie. He accepts responsibility for the deaths of her sisters and mother. Molly stays stoic and stands up, turns, and leaves the courtroom. The judge orders the arrest of Hale for murder. A new jury is sworn in and Hale is convicted to life in prison as J. Edgar Hoover looks on. Hale and White exchange looks and the former Texas Ranger points his hand like he’s pulling the trigger of a gun. Hoover tells reporters that “No one man is bigger than the Bureau.”
Wren brings Bryan Burkhart into custody and White tells his fellow agent how amazing it feels that a jury made up of 12 White men convicted another White man of murdering an Indian. Wren agrees. White approaches Mollie at her house, but keeps his distance. He tips his big hat and she finally breaks her aloofness. Mollie “nearly” smiles a thank you.
White leaves by train and Mollie, standing amongst the wildflowers on the prairie, watches it go across the landscape.
“I believe in right and wrong.”
– William Hale & Tom White
Killers of the Flower Moon
Screenplay by Eric Roth
153 pages
February 20, 2017
Both a procedural and a white savior film, this entertaining VERY early draft puts the emphasis on FBI agent Tom White. Mollie, Ernest and Hale have meaty supporting parts.
We start with Ernest and Mollie and all their children, and a full house of friends and relatives. The always reserved Mollie had a prior, abusive husband and has always been suspicious of Ernest, but is taken by his charisma. Ernest pleads his case that he’s a protector, and that makes him invaluable. Mollie believes him to be a truly good man where there aren’t many to find.
Mollie’s tempestuous sister Anna visits and has an altercation with Bryan, Ernest’s brother. Ernest then meets his uncle William Hale, and is always obsequious to him. Anna turns up dead and FBI agent Tom White appears on page 14, rifle over his shoulder, six gun on his hip, looking like a “full Brando cowboy.”
He’s introduced while picking up his lawman brother’s coffin in Texas. He talks to the coffin providing background info about his family and the Bureau. He has a wife and two sons. Then it flashes back to 1905, to the White brothers in their 20s, young Texas Rangers. Then more exposition is provided to the coffin. We learn that Tom’s partners always die and he becomes a loner, self-effacing, quietly emotional, dutiful but with a chip on his shoulder.
Then the action shifts to Anna’s public and extra gruesome autopsy. We flashback to Mollie when she was a young girl, learning about Thomas Jefferson stealing Osage land. Then we get flashbacks within flashbacks describing what eventually brought the Osage to Oklahoma. Then there’s a sequence of young Mollie being told by her father why she has to go away to a White school. We then see her in a Catholic Convent school, experiencing a culture crisis amid racist nuns.
We flash forward to Anna’s funeral and a scene between Mollie & Hale, where the latter describes how he became a wealthy self-made man and promises Mollie that he will hunt down Anna’s killer at all costs.
Mollie’s mother Lizzie dies and Mollie sings spiritually in a teepee. On page 30, Tom White arrives in DC and meets J. Edgar Hoover. The latter’s motive in investigating the Osage murders is that the Bureau had already sent people to Oklahoma before Hoover was in charge and he didn’t want their bungling to reflect poorly on him.
We meet Wren, the Native American partner assigned to White, a man who clearly hates partners. We learn that White’s grandfather got an arrow in his neck from a Comanche and could whistle “Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” through the hole. Then Tom mentions that he has a problem with partners, in case we weren’t aware of it.
We cut back to Mollie, asking her White Guardian for money to offer as a reward for the capture of Anna’s murderers. Mollie reveals that she thanks God that she has Ernest to take care of her. But we cut to Ernest being a spoiled rich kid and wanting more cars. Ernest and Mollie reminisce about when he was her chauffeur. But things get testy when she makes it clear who wears the pants in the family and who holds the purse strings. He feels chastised.
White sets up shop in Oklahoma City and reads a book on Osage history. He meets a few more FBI agents, and after looking through the files and photos, determines to start with Anna’s murder. He sends two men to pose as ranchers to Osage County to check out Hale and also sends an agent to pose as an insurance salesman because they typically can ask a lot of personal questions with impunity.
Hale hires a Pinkerton detective to find Anna’s murderers. Mollie, meanwhile, hires her own private detective whose casual racism pisses her off. Later, he reads a report out loud to Molly, which Ernest overhears. Most witnesses appear to lead to dead ends.
White & Wren are… wait for it… uneasy partners. While Molly appears paranoid to those around her that somebody is out to kill her, Ernest assures her that he’d strangle that person to death. Both detectives give up with nothing to show for it. It’s pretty clear by page 59 that Hale is in on it. Ernest disabuses Molly of the notion of being poisoned and gifts her with a diamond bracelet with three gold women on it: her sisters and mother.
Tom then meets (at a distance) Mollie, Ernest, and Hale at a July 4th parade. At Mollie’s Osage friend William Stepson’s autopsy, Tom finally introduces himself. She mistrusts him immediately. Tom is both Caucasian and from the government. White quotes Sherlock Holmes and starts eliminating suspects. Kelsie Morrison’s name comes up. White’s FBI cohorts use some archaic crime solving methods on him. White does LOTS of detective work on Anna’s murder.
Ernest and Mollie drive home one night to see all the light bulbs strung up on their street. The light protects you from harm, we learn. Then Ernest and Rita’s husband Bill Smith have a tense discussion about the identity of the murderers. Later that night, a bomb goes off under Bill and Rita’s house. White’s hotel room gets rocked.
At first impassive, Mollie shouts “I want to know who killed my sister! My mother and all of my sisters!” White may have caught onto Hale near the deceased Bill Smith’s hospital room. The way Hale says “I’ll pay for his arrangements” appears to irk him.
Molly again complains about being poisoned when the Shoun Brothers show up at her house with the insulin. Molly will have none of it. She grabs a rifle and Ernest overpowers her and pins her down while the brothers give her the injection. They leave and Ernest apologizes and professes his love.
White questions Ernest’s racist Aunt Margaret and Uncle Wayne and knows they’re lying about Bryan’s alibi. They all claimed to be at a play that was actually dark that night. Bryan was last seen with Anna.
Halfway into the screenplay, White asks aloud “If Bryan killed her, what for? Is he involved in the other murders?” No conspiracy… yet. But Bryan goes on the lam.
Mollie’s priest gives the Osage Chief a note from Mollie: “I am being poisoned.” The note gets to White and he pays a visit to the Burkharts, only Ernest isn’t there. He reaches the locked master bedroom door and makes his case, but Mollie won’t even talk to him, let alone open the door. White leaves, but notices her looking at him from the bedroom window.
White questions Hale at a restaurant. He’s sitting with the 2 undercover FBI agents posing as cattlemen… and Ernest. White states that there are “lots of people around here who seemed to have been loved to death.”
White questions the nurse on duty at the hospital before Bill Smith died, then the Shoun brothers. He’s an effective interrogator. On page 94, Bill Smith’s lawyer fingers Hale and Ernest as his two biggest and ONLY enemies.
White asks “Was Ernest in love with Miss Mollie when they got married four years ago? Or was it an opportunity to get at that headright. It’s kind of hard to believe that he went through all of that… share a bed with her… raise children with her… all the while plotting and scheming against her family.”
An indigenous man tries to stab White in his sleep but he gets outsmarted. Cut to a real/imagined scene of Tom White standing over Hale in his pajamas in his bed. White, like a spectral assassin says “you must of forgot to say your prayers… You’re gonna need em.” Then he kisses Hale’s forehead and disappears “like a ghost.”
White pleads before the Tribal Council for cooperation. The Osage Chief says his people may have to take things into their own hands as a last resort. White decides that his evidence sucks and he needs to go into deep outlaw country with his Winchester and his Texan charm to find more evidence. He rides his high horse through the Osage hills with the realization that no Caucasian in Oklahoma would implicate one of their own for the murder of an Indian. So he decides to find the scuzziest and scummiest of sources, hiding in the hills. Back at the office, the FBI team looks at mugshots of various Hale associates and associates of associates and we see their eventual murders. Anyone who could implicate Hale winds up dead or missing.
Hale’s ranch conflagrates while White is in his hotel room. Ernest is on Hale’s porch with him. “Thick as thieves,” White says contemptuously.
White finally meets Mollie in her teepee, but Ernest comes barging in with a gun. Mollie remains passive.
Ernest and Hale get implicated by Burt Lawson, a prison inmate and former ranch hand of Hale. “When Hale says jump, Ernest say how high.” He also calls Ernest a snake in the grass.” Supposedly, Hale and Ernest pick him up in a car after the Bill Smith explosion and drive him back to jail and then the deputy sneaks him back into his cell. White doesn’t quite believe it because Lawson never looks him in the eye, but pressure from Hoover sees him getting arrest warrants for Hale and Ernest.
Ernest gets arrested in a pool hall and a Marshal slams his face against a pool table while handcuffing him. Hale turns himself in at the Fairfax jail.
An FBI agent punches Ernest viciously in the gut, making him puke. As the agent starts to hit him again, White stops him. He also lies to Ernest that Hale gave him up, calling his nephew a “weakling” and “water carrier.” Ernest almost buckles, but sees through it.
White gets dressed down by Hoover for arresting Hale with circumstantial evidence. Hale could prove he received a telegram in Texas at the time of the bombing. He meets with a wheelchair-bound Mollie. “He might be weak, but his heart is true,” Mollie says of her husband. “You can know someone’s heart if it hasn’t turned to stone,” she reiterates. White wheels Mollie into the interrogation room of the Federal building and Ernest puts his head in her lap as she strokes it.
A shackled Blackie Thompson is brought in to great fanfare. “Hale and Burkhart are too much Jew – They want everything for nothing,” he says. He rats them out for the murder of Bill and Rita Smith in exchange for Ernest’s car. Ernest faces Blackie, but still won’t crack. Yet Ernest summons White in the middle of the night to confess. “She’s the one, Mollie, I’m doin’ this for…”
After facing the enormity of his job, White finally says to Wren “I get it. White people in Oklahoma think no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724.” White asks Ernest if he was giving only insulin to Mollie. He doesn’t answer, just stifles a cry. Then White just asks “Why?” Again, no answer.
White goes after Hale in his cell. Hale calls Ernest a coward and a Shakespearean fool and “nobody listens to a fool.” White slyly accuses Hale of impregnating Anna and having her killed. Hale keeps his composure. White counters with “Beware of the fool he speaks the truth, because he doesn’t know any better.”
White goes to visit Mollie’s bedside. She’s at death’s door. He lifts her up and carries her out of the house into a waiting ambulance. White has a doctor from New York come to Oklahoma and run medical tests on Mollie. He suspects strychnine or arsenic. Next up, the Shoun brothers, whom he accuses of attempted murder. White roughly slams one of them up against a wall.
The action shifts to the courtroom on page 133. Ernest takes the stand and Mollie sits in the back to support her husband. An FBI agent asks White “How does she stand by him?” He answers “Love is a curious confusing thing.”
White predicts that Ernest will recant on the stand. Hale’s lawyer bellows that Ernest is HIS client. The judge allows them to confer in his chambers. When Ernest returns to the witness stand, he recants and claims coercion by the FBI. Hale takes the stand and claims that he was likewise tortured by White and his thugs.
But FBI informant Kelsie Morrison takes the stand and details Hale's plan to eradicate Mollie’s family. Mollie sits next to Ernest and sweetly touches his shoulder, “still in love with him.” White feels hopeless about the case.
Cut to White on horseback in the Oklahoma mountains going deer hunting. Wren joins him and they look at the prairie below, discussing whether we can all live together peacefully.
At the funeral of Mollie & Ernest’s daughter, White rides up on a horse and makes a beeline to Mollie. He tells her in Osage that he’s sorry for her great sadness. She replies in Osage that a child is everyone’s sadness. Respectfully, Mollie hands White a shovel. He shovels some dirt onto the coffin and says “this is your land.”
White is supposed to take Ernest back to jail, but the lawman has other ideas. They wind up on the prairie, alone. White tells Ernest he can go… just… take the car… and leave… and suggests Mexico. But he tells Ernest that he needs to decide what kind of man he wants to be. They part. Ernest is free as a bird.
Back at the courtroom, the jury is deadlocked amid allegations of jury tampering. Just then… Ernest appears at the back of the courtroom. He has something to say. He wants to change his plea to guilty. On the stand, he says that he has done most of what he’s accused of. He looks directly at Mollie and says “God forgive me… I attempted to, along with the Shoun Brothers, poison my wife for her inheritance.” Then he turns to Hale and says that he did it all for him. Ernest jumps up and pounces on Hale, bashing his head over and over into the floor.
When things quiet down, Ernest continues to testify while looking straight at Mollie. He accepts responsibility for the deaths of her sisters and mother. Molly stays stoic and stands up, turns, and leaves the courtroom. The judge orders the arrest of Hale for murder. A new jury is sworn in and Hale is convicted to life in prison as J. Edgar Hoover looks on. Hale and White exchange looks and the former Texas Ranger points his hand like he’s pulling the trigger of a gun. Hoover tells reporters that “No one man is bigger than the Bureau.”
Wren brings Bryan Burkhart into custody and White tells his fellow agent how amazing it feels that a jury made up of 12 White men convicted another White man of murdering an Indian. Wren agrees. White approaches Mollie at her house, but keeps his distance. He tips his big hat and she finally breaks her aloofness. Mollie “nearly” smiles a thank you.
White leaves by train and Mollie, standing amongst the wildflowers on the prairie, watches it go across the landscape.