Overlooking!

All John could do was look down!

- Climb the hill and look down on Strawberry Town!

Perhaps at this time, towns the size of West Elizabeth are filled with bounty hunters and police waiting to capture John. As for John himself, he provoked the Marauders of Lemoine, lost Miller, and delayed Mrs. McLifever, so that he was displaced. This cowboy with the fire of revenge burning in his heart is getting farther and farther away from his goal......

Early in the morning, the Great Valley:

June 5, 1900: The heat was coming, and I was still wandering in the wilderness, recalling a spring and autumn journey from West Texas to here, where we could sit under the eaves in the summer heat, boil water in the winter and bathe in the winter, and we had enough money to hire a woman to help us take a bath. But everything changed in Armadillo, and Miller was separated from me under Lemon's banishment, damn it! He's carrying all the cash! And me? I had to beg for food, and Mrs. McLifever's canned food was running out, and I was in dire need of finding a substitute, and luckily I found some berries, but it only lasted a few days. If I starve to death in this wilderness, the coyotes will divide my corpse to eat, and it would be wishful thinking to leave the whole corpse behind.

The only thing you can do is learn the way of survival of wild beasts, lock your prey in the dense forest, and don't miss any chance, because once your heart is soft, you can only wait for hunger and death. However, when there is a group of "civilized people" with guns who are trying to capture you all day long, it is better to hide in the wilderness.

John stopped writing, his diary had not been opened by him for a long time, let alone continued to write the journal above, John had retained the habit of sketching before, but all this was abandoned as he settled down with Ashley and lived a solid life. Now that John is a lone wolf, he has the urge to write again.

Thinking of this, John pulled the Black Pearl closer and prepared to add an illustration of a horse for today's diary, because the horse is more symbolic of the precarious life of the western cowboy, and John is like that now, isn't it?

The sun rises slowly, casting its shadow on the leaves of the great oak trees, leaving many shaky glowing islands on the ground. From Strawberry Town, the voices of people came one after another—the voices of the world.

But the difference was that at the foot of the Great Valley, on the high ground behind the Strawberry Town Inn, a rough and thick song was heard.

"We are pioneers of the West, from far away in the East China Sea, and the bartender laughs at us, and the maid looks down on us, so we are exiled to this uninhabited land. One year, all the redwoods in the tall woods fell, and Beecher built a wooden house at his wish; In the second year, the stone quarry of the coulter village was abundant, and the down-and-out Ensa gave up his stone town just to have something to talk about at the gambling table; In three years, we marched into Saint-Denis, drove out the sheriff there, and became capitalists. Oh... Oh, we're pioneers of the West, we've soiled our coats, we've kicked our shoes, we've got a bite on the ground, and we've got the best stories to tell!"

Pioneers of the West? Maybe it's someone who's been outcast by the Franco-Prussian society like John, hunger has activated John's curiosity, maybe it's time to meet someone new! There is clearly no malice in the singing.

Even so, John cautiously descended the ravine, his rifle in his hand, and with a high degree of mental alertness, he moved forward almost slowly. In a few moments, a row of half-man-high walls of rubble appeared in front of him, and on top of the wall, more than a dozen heads stood out, and one of them, almost covered by hair, looked at John cautiously.

"Hey lad, tell me you're not a bounty hunter!" The head with the rings of history spoke, and the voice had the same depth as the previous song, and it should be the same person.

When John heard this, a big stone fell to the ground in his heart, and he answered his uncle's question generously.

"If I were, ten of you heads would hit the ground."

The uncle warmly invited John to come to the campfire they had set up, and on the fire were sheep of unknown families with wooden forks—the men had stolen them, but John could not do much of it, and he was so hungry that he gobbled up the lamb in his mouth with his permission.

After a while, the mutton was wiped out, and the white bones crackled under the flames, oozing golden bone oil, and listening to John's satisfied praise, the uncle smiled knowingly.

John learned from a pleasant conversation that his uncle's name was Joshua Finger, an exile from the South Carolina State Penitentiary, who had been sent to Louisiana's backward areas for large-scale development, accompanied by more than a dozen people. But John thinks Joshua's accent is not Southern, and it sounds like a modified Southern dialect, even a bit of a northern politician. John suspected that Uncle Joshua had reservations about him, so he went to the side of a man who looked honest and honest, and the man could not resist the temptation of the silver leather buckle in John's hand, and confided the truth in 1510.

It turns out that Joshua was a prisoner on the English island of Alcatraz, exiled to the barren land of Mexico to be punished by eagles (the European way of executing "wizards" at the end of the nineteenth century, tortured to a slump and then released into the Mexican desert, where they were eaten by eagles, vultures and falcons). When his escort ship was involved in a dispute between the local indigenous people and was accidentally damaged and sunk by a Cuban warship while passing through Guama Island, he and more than a dozen surviving prisoners grabbed a barge and traveled north to the relative safety of Louisiana through the Caribbean Sea.

Such an image is somewhat inconsistent with the kind and kind uncle in John's heart, and John returns to the uncle and chats with the uncle.

"John." The uncle said with a sigh: "Do you know how negative we are in South Carolina? The poor lacked food and clothing, and the peasants were unable to pay their grain on time because of taxes. And then there are the government officials who run around every day for those empty railroad bonds and oil bonds. The uncle pointed at himself very aggrievedly, "They killed people and planted them afterwards, and this is how I was involved in them." Oh, by the way, the economy has finally picked up, fuck, it has attracted a lot of rich businessmen, and as a result, most of the rich people's money has been put into the gambling table, hahaha, you know how the economy got up now, right? I have to say, those bosses really have a set. ”

The uncle paused his speech and looked up at John, who was full of embarrassment, wondering where this stranger, who had deliberately concealed his identity, could make up such a basket of words.

"Oh, I know, my hometown is so bad that no one wants to hear it. Let's talk about war...... War...... It's been decades, and I still can't forget it, but I dare say that your parents must have fought in the war, after all, they all went to the West Coast, and who wouldn't be affected? Neither the North nor the South is a good thing, and there is no winner or loser in this war. ”

"The North has won, freeing the slaves of the South." John shook his head.

"Oh, well, the North is indeed righteous, and I have always supported the North. I can't wait for the slaves to be emancipated, and there are some foreigners who come by boat, whether criminals or merchants, and this free country should be honest with each other. ”

John felt that the uncle was on the right track at this point.

"Yes, I wonder what about the British Empire, is the state as bad as South Carolina? Alcatraz Island in particular. John didn't know why he said that, he thought it would anger his uncle, but he had to tell the truth.

Perhaps because of John's intentional entanglement, the uncle's pale face suddenly turned red, and there was a murderous intent between his eyebrows, he stood up and pushed John who was sitting on the wooden pier to the ground, and his entourage immediately surrounded him.

"Children, if this lost lamb has the slightest thought of running away, you will skin him." Uncle pointed at John with a whiskey bottle.

"Yay!" The English hillbillies gathered around, and even though John was half a head taller than them, they still wanted to be rough with him, and even the honest man was playing with the silver clasp not far away, and he was schadenfreude......