Bowen was a true standard of the old west. He lived through the true wild and untamed, lived by the bullet and drunk by the bottle. A tall grizzled old man, he fights like a dog to cling to his old and wild youth. Though his mind is set deep in the dusty beat down earth of wagon trails to the free land, and his eyes rest in wavy golden plain grass, the world caught up to him.

Afraid to lose nature and the wild song that played to him, Bowen clung to the natural order of the lawless west. Fighting wars he couldn't win with pathetic payouts, and trying to lose himself in the soft slates of nature preserved between towns-- Bowen tried to ignore the beating of time's steam-rolling drum.

After finding Thatcher, Bowen found renewed purpose. The boy provided a feeling of necessity that long burned away in his outlaw blazes of glory. Bowen aimed to teach Thatcher the law of the land, and the freedom of the west that he had in his day.

Though jobs didn't run as smoothly with just a man and his son. Law had a bigger hold on the new civilized world that Bowen could have ever wondered. The pillars in the sky shrouded by great big clogs of black were unrecognizable to Bowen's gleaming old amber eyes.

As much as he thought he knew his place in a wild section of the world, modernity caught up to him. Bowen was lost in a world he knew nothing about anymore, a world in which he held no power. He was as useless and gone as any other old man from the civil war and before; lost with no limbs and begging for money or affection in the dirt.

The west had been conquered by the great human need to gather and thrive. There was no need for outlaws, or gangs, or men on their own with black horses and gleaming silver pistols.

Bowen had fallen to a petty disgrace and as he stared appalled at Thatcher's horrified face, a shiny cold barrel pressed between his eyes, he recognized that he had taken the only person he cared about down with him.

Sweet release is what Bowen had always called it. The final song of nature pulling you in to nestle in her arms. The nigh-time hoot of the cosmic owl brushing your eyes shut. The richest you become is the dollar coins on your eyes.

Being free, under the desert grass of an unmarked grave as the world passes over him, was true nature and all he wanted in the end. And so he was free, a white cross inscribed "Bowen" and next to it, a grave in which lay his son, and his closest friend.