Andrews leaves Butcher’s Crossing

Will Andrews leaves Butcher’s Crossing at first light, after the expedition’s return has ended in ruin and the town’s old economy has begun to disappear. His departure is not a homecoming or a confident arrival at a new life: he refuses the return to Boston he once might have made, leaves Francine money without waking her, and rides out with no destination more definite than a general direction. The final movement replaces the promise of a discovered identity with an open, uncertain road.

The Night Before Departure

Andrews’s departure follows the night of the fire that consumes J.D. McDonald’s hides. He remains at the blaze after the others have gone, watching a charred bale collapse into ash and recalling the figures who have just left the scene. Miller rides away from the destruction he set in motion; Charley Hoge follows him; McDonald’s furious pursuit of an animal ends in collapse. The fire’s brief flare becomes the last image Andrews carries from the night, a conflagration that gathers the expedition’s fixation, losses, and broken business into one vanishing spectacle.

At dawn, Andrews turns his back on the fire and walks to his room. The change is decisive but subdued: there is no speech of resolution, only the end of his vigil and the practical actions that follow. The contrast between the blaze behind him and the grey morning ahead gives his exit its shape. He does not try to repair what has been destroyed or restore the expedition’s old purpose; instead, he leaves the ruined scene behind.

Francine and the Refusal to Return

Francine is asleep when Andrews enters. In the early light he sees her unguarded, with her hair fallen across her face and her body relaxed in sleep. The sight brings him a tenderness and compassion he recognizes as different from the pity he felt when he first came to her room months earlier. He now judges that earlier pity as small and contemptuous. His attention to Francine has changed, but the scene does not turn into a declaration or a renewed relationship: he watches her, wants to touch her face, and refrains so that he will not wake her.

Before leaving, Andrews takes two banknotes from his money pouch and puts them in his pocket, leaving the rest neatly on the table beside the sofa. He considers that Francine will need money wherever she goes, while he will need funds for a new rug and curtains. The division makes the departure concrete: he provides for her without asking her to accompany him or demanding anything in return, while retaining only what he needs for the road. He leaves quietly and does not look back at her.

The room also becomes the setting for Andrews’s final recognition that he will not go back to his father’s house. Looking toward the eastern light, he thinks of his father as a severe, slender figure who has become almost a stranger in his thoughts. He understands that he will not return to Boston, the city that raised him and gave him a social shape before he set out for the wilderness in search of a supposedly more authentic self. The decision is not presented as a triumphant escape: he recognizes that both his attraction to Francine and his journey west had been driven by vanity, and that neither passion delivered the settled identity he had imagined.

Leaving the Town

Andrews takes his mount from the stable and wakes the stable hand to give him one of the banknotes he kept. He saddles and rides out in the dim light, but the man has already gone back to sleep before Andrews can properly take his leave. The dust muffles the hoofbeats as Andrews passes the nearly empty street and looks over what remains of Butcher’s Crossing. The settlement appears to him as a small heap of ruins: its wooden buildings may be dismantled for reusable material, its sod huts weathered away, and prairie grass gradually cover the road.

He passes the still-smoking remains of McDonald’s hut and a stand of cottonwoods, crosses the stream, and stops to look back. The sun makes a narrow band of light along the eastern horizon. Ahead, his shadow stretches over new grass; he feels the reins in his hand, the saddle beneath him, and his mount breathing. These details return the departure to immediate bodily experience after the night’s abstractions and memories. Andrews takes a deep breath of the fresh grass-scented air and rides into the open country.

An Unfixed Direction

Andrews knows only the general direction in which he is travelling. He expects that the destination will come to him later in the day; he continues without haste as the rising sun warms the air behind him. The ending gives him movement without a plan and distance without a promised arrival. He has rejected the familiar home and left the settlement, but the narrative does not replace them with a new home, vocation, or declared purpose.

That uncertainty answers the journey’s earlier ambition. Andrews had crossed much of the continent believing that the wilderness might disclose his definitive identity. In the valley, the scale of the slaughter and the approaching destruction of the herd had made the world beyond the mountains grow indistinct in his memory; the place seemed to give his own existence shape. Now, after leaving the valley and returning to a town already diminishing, he can admit the vanity behind the search. His departure does not prove that he has found a truer self in nature. It carries him onward after the dream of a final self has lost its force.

The Ruined Frontier

The landscape Andrews leaves is also the aftermath of commercial hunting. Miller had recalled that, only a few years earlier, immense numbers of bison darkened the Kansas plains, and that hunters could bring back a thousand or fifteen hundred in a fortnight. By the time he spoke, the herds had broken into small groups and a successful hunt might yield only a few hundred; he expected Kansas to offer no more bison within a year or two. Andrews had also seen what that extraction left behind: bones stretching across the prairie, once piled from Pawnee Fork toward the end of Smoky Hill, now exposed to scavenging and the prospect of being collected for fertilizer.

The valley’s final phase makes that loss immediate. As Miller continued shooting, Fred Schneider and Andrews struggled to skin the animals quickly enough, working before dawn and until after sunset. Andrews came to understand that Miller would not leave while any bison remained alive; he measured the return not by passing days but by the shrinking herd. Back in town, J.D. McDonald explains that the railroad will pass fifty miles north, while hunters sell bison meat to the railway company and leave the hides to rot. The hide market and the expedition’s ambitions have both become obsolete. Andrews’s ride begins among the material remains of that change, but it offers no restoration of the vanished herds or the settlement. The open plain is a way forward, not a promise that the damage can be undone.