Chapter 8: Wilderness Scenery

Valentine's morning is different from Blackwater, where there is a lack of civilized education, early in the morning, when the dew on the tips of the leaves has not evaporated, the men will shout in droves to go to the tavern to drink, and when they get drunk, they may find an unpleasant unlucky person to find an inexplicable reason to beat them up, and then stagger into the brothel in full view of everyone, and what happened after that is beyond words.

It is worth mentioning that there were more brothels in Valentine than in any other town in New Hanover, and some of the small-fashioned and well-known horse dealers would pick one of them after making a deal on the black market for horses in the Emerald Ranch, which made the money bags of the skilled women never lose weight—they considered their profession to be extremely noble and proud, but I have to admit that it was indeed a bad habit that was not worthy of admiration, but when it reached the ears of law-abiding women of good families, they hated it. There is a poem in China, tens of thousands of miles away, that vividly depicts this kind of psychology: when the window is envious of the prostitute in the green building, the ten fingers do not move the clothes and the box.

It is a pity that the hard-working wives have to watch their husbands enter the richly decorated rooms of other women, and they themselves tirelessly carry the swill into the pig trough day after day...... The town of Valentine gathered many people of unknown origin, among them prostitutes, homosexuals, loan sharks, debt evaders, beggars, prisoners, fugitives, etc., whose misdeeds made Valentine a miasma, and Valentine became a natural prison, but different from the usual depression of other prisons

The "prisoner" brought unprecedented vitality to Valentine, both economically and politically, making it a truly open and free town.

If you have a hand-drawn map of the west, you can find that the towns around Valentine - Annisberg in the east, St. Denis in the southeast, Strawberry Town in the west, and even the coulter village in the north, which has not yet formed a town scale, are more civilized than it, but it is not difficult to find that those towns only accepted civilization before Valentine, and then formed an encirclement and marched towards Valentine in the middle, no wonder the troubadours of the heart of the earth always said that Valentine's barbarism and lewdness would disappear sooner or later.

So, before the capitalists have built all sorts of mines in Valentine, when the chimneys of the metallurgical mills have not yet risen over the land, and when Valentine is still a full-fledged cattle town, take off your riding boots and enjoy yourself barefoot on the rutted and wet soil of Valentine, for soon the romantic and intimate wilderness will be as devoid as it was in the days of outlaws and sharpshooters......