The patron saint of taciturn, road-worn men with good hearts and troubled minds smiles on Spencer Dutton in this week’s 1923.
After weeks of violent misadventures, Jake and Cara’s nephew winds up on a train bound for home during the episode. We’re not saying he’s in the clear — because he’s already run into trouble on the rails once this season — but he’s a lot better off than when he was trying to stay up all night in a boxcar full of sketchballs, no?
Elsewhere, Alex is doing better by the end of the episode, as well… but goodness gracious, the terribleness she has to go through before she gets there! Read on for the highlights of “Only Gunshots to Guide Us.”
THE MARSHALS CATCH UP | Marshal Kent talks to Anders (played by C. Thomas Howell, The Outsiders), one of the cowboys we met last episode, who is having a hard time believing that Teonna is a multiple murderer. Kent tells him that the young woman is a bloodthirsty, evolutionary “bridge” between animals and humanity (ugh) who “must be erased from this planet.” Anders says he hasn’t seen her, but he also doesn’t really trust Kent: He wants to hear about Teonna’s crimes from Father Renaud himself.
So Anders asks Renaud why Teonna killed the nuns. “Because she is evil, and evil does not need a reason,” the priest says, and it’s enough to get Anders to admit that she, Pete and Runs His Horse accompanied them on the cattle drive — though he doesn’t know where they went after. Based on hoofprints, they discern that the trio went north, and Renaud and Kent take off in that direction.
When we catch up with Teonna, Runs His Horse and Pete, they are indeed riding north — aka away from the posters — despite not knowing the terrain. After Pete peels off to look for water for the horses, Teonna angrily turns to her dad. “What do we think we’re doing? Everywhere is America. Everywhere used to be our country. Not one of us ever escaped.” He points out that they’re the last ones still fighting, so they have to make it.
Pete does find a watering hole… but it happens to be the same one where Renaud and Kent are giving their horses a drink. They take off after him. As Pete flees, his overtaxed horse starts to falter, and then collapses. He rolls to his feet, grabs a gun, and then there’s a gunshot: We’ll have to wait to the next episode to see what happens next.
MAMIE MEETS SPENCER | Spencer is sleeping under a tree, hat over his face, when Mamie and her men wake him, guns drawn. She takes his gun, then he fields their questions about the animals he’s encountered and whether he’s seen Teonna, Pete and Runs His Horse or Father Renaud and the marshals. When they find out he’s headed to Montana, Mamie snarks, “Sure are a lot of folks from Montana wandering around West Texas.” She’s suspicious of him, so she orders him to come with them to Amarillo, despite his insistence that he’s not running from anyone or anything. “All you’re going to do out here is die. You’re 30 miles from water. If you ain’t a fugitive,” she tells him, “this is the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to you.”
In Amarillo, Marshal Fossett takes Spencer to the sheriff’s office and calls Sheriff McDowell. “You sound like a woman,” the surprised lawman says (ha!), and he demands that she put the male sheriff on the line to verify her authority (grr), but at least he apologizes when they both return to the line. She asks if he can vouch for Spencer. “Marshal, that’s a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. The president vouched for him,” McDowell shoots back. Then there’s a fun game of telephone, on the telephone. She asks Spencer if he won the meda. Spencer says he hasn’t heard that news. McDowell says “he received it just the same,” and asks to talk to Spencer.
Spencer only wants to know if the men who killed his brother, John, are still free. “You better stay in Texas if your plan is to come back here and start a war,” McDowell warns him. “As far as I know, war’s already started, and you ain’t stopped it… Tell my aunt I’m coming home, can you do that?” McDowell advises him to stop by the sheriff’s department when he comes home, because the Montana he left is not the Montana of the present.
Mamie has no choice but to let Spencer go. “I think you owe me a train ticket,” he says. When he balks at the train porter’s request that he check his gun, Spencer looks disgusted. “What happened to this country? What other rules were made when I was killing for this place?” he asks as he climbs aboard. OK, Rip, calm down.
ALEX’S LIFE SOMEHOW GETS WORSE | On the train, Alex is delivered yet another blow: The ticket she bought doesn’t include meal service. So while the mother sharing Alex’s sleeper car divvies a meager dinner among her kids, Mrs. Dutton chases after the porter and asks him to help her find something to eat. After all, it’s been days since she’s had a morsel, and she’s got a taciturn little lion hunter in the oven!
The dining car’s manager isn’t nice to her, exactly, but he offers her regular meals in exchange for her working as a waitress. So Alex dons a uniform, buses tables and engages in servile labor for the first time in her life. She’s pouring tea for a passenger when the train lurches and she winds up spilling all over the table and him. Of course, he’s gross about demanding that she mop up his trousers, as well. The upside? She does get fed, after a long day on her feet, and she’s able to keep the tips she makes. “Now you know what it’s like,” her cabinmate says, unsympathetically, as Alex climbs into her bunk after her first day of work. The woman adds that Alex should marry if she wants to make it in America, but Alex informs her she’s already wed to a rancher. “Be careful with cowboys, love. Treat their horses better than their ladies.” And with that, Alex has just about reached her limit. “With all due respect, you don’t look like someone who should be giving advice,” she says wearily. But the woman responds that she’s doing everything for her kids, and that Alex will understand someday: “Mothers can endure anything.” Then, in case we didn’t get it, Elsa voiceovers that a mother’s love is really, REALLY powerful.
The next morning at breakfast, Alex waits on a snobby British couple named Hillary and Paul (played by New Amsterdam‘s Janet Montgomery and The Morning Show‘s Augustus Prew, respectively) and winds up chatting with them; she’s grateful when they generously tip. Her spirit is briefly buoyed… until she sees that the only other patron in the dining car is the slimeball who made her touch his (clothed) junk the day before. He notes that she’s not wearing stockings, and when she draws closer to pour his coffee, he slides his hand up her skirt. She instantly freezes — and this is not the point, but how cool is the sound design in this scene? We immediately know what’s going on, and how she’s about to fugue out, without a single word — but then comes back to herself, pours the hot liquid all over the guy and then bashes his brains in with the coffee pot. When she realizes what she’s done, she runs, but is rounded up by a conductor and thrown in the train’s version of the brig. “He raped me with his hand. Is that not a crime on your trains?” she asks the unsympathetic conductor, who tells her her fate will be in the hands of the Chicago police.
When the train pulls into the Windy City, the British passengers who chatted with Alex — and witnessed her violation — interrupt Alex’s arrest to say they saw what happened. “He groped her privates, and she defended herself,” Hillary says. The cop responds that the scumbag told him that Alex was his girlfriend. “Well, officer, I think you should consider that a rapist might also be capable of lying,” she says. The Brits are willing to make a statement, so the cop uncuffs Alex and she thanks her benefactors. Alex’s attacker is arrested instead, and she is free to go.
She immediately sees the Irish woman who was sharing her cabin, who’s about to leave with Alex’s valise and her tip money. She grabs them back and heads into the train station… where her connecting train to Fargo has been cancelled because of a snowdrift: It’ll leave when the snow melts. And, as the unhelpful rail company employee tells her, that’s not happening anytime soon.
A despondent Alex crosses paths with the British couple again at the station; she informs them about the cancelled train, then she starts sobbing. The husband, Paul, invites her to come with them to Winnetka, Ill. “It seems a bit of respite from your adventures might be needed,” he says, picking up her bag. “You’ve seen what happens to men with wayward hands around me,” she says flatly, and he assures her that he won’t touch her. Then Paul and his wife lead her out of the station.
WHITFIELD’S NEXT PLAYTHING | Banner and two of his men take Christy’s body to the train station, ruminate about her cause of death, then unceremoniously hurl her into a ravine. “And just like that, a problem disappears,” Clyde says, gloating about how they’re getting away with something highly illegal.
Meanwhile, Lindy goes to town and finds a new plaything/potential victim for Whitfield. “I have a client who’ll pay in one night what you don’t make in a month,” she tells a blonde sex worker who’s initially reluctant to her pitch. “He’s got a big appetite. One’s not enough,” Lindy continues. “He’s British, so he likes a little theater in the bedroom, you know what I mean?” Then she kisses the other woman, and she’s sold: The two leave, arm in arm. (Run, girl, run!)