The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward.
Ultimately, the story is about how the west was tamed. The domesticity of Marshall Potter is a metaphor for the domestication of the Wild West. The opening line situates this change within the central historical symbol of that change: the locomotive (the Pullman) which was essential to populating America west of the Mississippi River.
As a matter of truth, Jack Potter was beginning to find his deed weighing upon him like a great stone.
The story’s thematic deconstruction of the myth of the American west really kicks in here because the reader immediately learns Jack Potter is the lawman of a western frontier town. Generic conventions imply that a lawman worrying about a deed weighing upon him would have something to do with his duties of keeping bad guys at bay. Instead, the deed weighing Potter down is his recent marriage; another no-no within the genre.
He was stiffening and steadying, but yet somewhere at the back of his mind a vision of the Pullman floated, the sea-green figured velvet, the shining brass, silver, and glass, the wood that gleamed as darkly brilliant as the surface of a pool of oil -- all the glory of the marriage, the environment of the new estate.
Inevitably, the lawman and the bad man must meet for their appointment with destiny, even in a western story intent on deconstructing myths. When it happens here, the most notable aspect is how it defies convention: the marshal is not only unarmed, but walking his new wife to her new home when without warning they both come face to face with the gunslinger as he is filling his revolver with bullets. As he stares into the eyes of his nemesis and confesses he does not have his gun, Marshal Potter’s mind unreels to the train ride and the juxtaposition brings into sharp relief just much things are changing. Through the contrast of the elegance of the modernistic train with the already seemingly archaic business of being town marshal, the changing tenor of the times becomes inescapable.
He was like a creature allowed a glimpse of another world.
The same epiphany soon comes to the man on the opposite side of this generic construction. Scratchy Wilson—the gunslinger in this showdown—also experiences a moment of blinding insight, though his reaction is distinctly different from the lawman’s. The shock of recognition which instantly transforms Scratchy and makes him realize the world he knew has just been changed forever comes with the slow, slightly dim-witted understanding that the woman walking with Potter is his wife. The burst of comprehension is preceded by a description of this slow dawning:
"Married?" said Scratchy. Seemingly for the first time he saw the drooping, drowning woman at the other man's side. "No!" he said.
