Corrie takes Pendergast to meet "Brushy Jim," a semi-deranged Vietnam veteran who is an avid collector of Old West memorabilia, and the town authority on "The Curse of the Forty-Fives." Pleased to have an interested audience, Jim tells the story: the Forty-Fives were a group of Confederate Army veterans who formed a guerilla band after the Civil War to hunt Native Americans in the Kansas territory and make it "safe" for the white settlers. The Forty-Fives were both cowardly and brutal, and their modus operandi was to attack unprotected villages and slaughter the women and children. One night, a group of Cheyenne warriors managed to ambush the Forty-Fives, appearing behind their sentries and disappearing like ghosts, after killing all of them. The Forty-Fives' leader, horribly mutilated, pronounced a curse on the land shortly before he died.