Two notorious assassin brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, are hired by the Commodore to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. The novel is narrated by Eli, the more thoughtful and sensitive of the two brothers, who begins to question his violent lifestyle and his loyalty to his ruthless brother Charlie. They travel from Oregon City to California searching for Warm, meeting all sorts of strange and colourful characters along the way. When they finally meet Warm, they learn that he has developed a chemical formula to locate gold, leading to a moral conflict about whether to kill him or join forces with him, with Eli increasingly wrestling with his growing disillusionment with his life and life in general. This is a sort of slow western genre story, and I found it difficult to get into. I would like to see the film because I am convinced that it will give a more profound meaning to the whole story.
“The rough estimate of these riches was set at fifteen thousand dollars; my take of this more than tripled my savings, and as we left the musty basement, heading up the stairs and into the light, I felt two things at once: A gladness at this turn of fortune, but also an emptiness that I did not feel more glad; or rather, a fear that my gladness was forced or false. I thought, Perhaps a man is never meant to be truly happy. Perhaps there is no such a thing in our world, after all.”