IN THE SATURDAY AFTERNOON ADVENTURE MOVIES I saw as a kid, there’d always come a scene in which the hero would deliver to the villain a high-toned speech.
“It’s kind of sad about you, Vance,” he would say. “If you had employed your great talents for Good instead of Evil, you could have become a captain of industry or a Nobel Prize winning chemist who finally unravelled the molecular structure of the chromosome chain.”
To this, Vance would reply, “You'll never take me alive, copper,” and a shoot out would follow. The hero would emerge with the kind of flesh wound that heals itself overnight with no scar. The villain would end up as a corpse stretched in the dust.
Jubilant townsfolk would surround the hero.
“Wow, Tex, look at that! You have rid the world of Absolute Evil. This calls for a party. The sarsaparilla is on us today.”
But, curiously, Tex doesn’t share in the general merriment.
“That’s fine,” he says, in a flat voice. “You boys go on ahead. I want to be alone for a while.”
“Huh?” asks one admirer.
“Well, the world will certainly be a better place without Absolute Evil,” Tex explains, “but I only had the one brother.”
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