It did not make much difference in Duane's thought of them that the majority were steeped in crime and brutality, more often than not stupid from rum, incapable of a fine feeling, just lost wild dogs.
Duane doubted that there was a man among them who did not realize his moral wreck and ruin.

He had met poor, half witted wretches who knew it.
He believed he could enter into their minds and feel the truth of all their lives--the hardened outlaw, coarse, ignorant, bestial, who murdered as Bill Black had murdered, who stole for the sake of stealing, who craved money to gamble and drink, defiantly ready for death, and, like that terrible outlaw, Helm, who cried out on the scaffold, "Let her rip!" The wild youngsters seeking notoriety and reckless adventure; the cowboys with a notch on their guns, with boastful pride in the knowledge that they were marked by rangers; the crooked men from the North, defaulters, forgers, murderers, all pale-faced, flat-chested men not fit for that wilderness and not surviving; the dishonest cattlemen, hand and glove with outlaws, driven from their homes; the old grizzled, bow-legged genuine rustlers--all these Duane had come in contact with, had watched and known, and as he felt with them he seemed to see that as their lives were bad, sooner or later to end dismally or tragically, so they must pay some kind of earthly penalty--if not of conscience, then of fear; if not of fear, then of that most terrible of all things to restless, active men--pain, the pang of flesh and bone.
Duane knew, for he had seen them pay.

Best of all, moreover, he knew the internal life of the gun-fighter of that select but by no means small class of which he was representative.

The world that judged him and his kind judged him as a machine, a killing-machine, with only mind enough to hunt, to meet, to slay another man.

It had taken three endless years for Duane to understand his own father.