Bleeding to death under a dead tree in the middle of the prairie, he lies there, old Sam, when the gunslinger Tom finds him. In his final words, he talks about the legendary gold of the Iowa Indians that he had actually seen in the blue mountains – from which no pale face has yet returned alive. When two Indians appear on the horizon, Tom searches for space – and so the Iowas bring the corpse of Sam, popular for his stomach-turning firewater, to his son Bill. It is assumed that a bear killed him, but doubts soon arise about this theory.