The most courteous frontier companions can be notorious killers.

Evidence

On my way down I spoke to the woman at whose cabin I had dined, and she said, ”I am sure you found Comanche Bill a real gentleman”; and I then knew that, if she gave me correct information, my intelligent, courteous companion was one of the most notorious desperadoes of the Rocky Mountains, and the greatest Indian exterminator on the frontiera man whose father and family fell in a massacre at Spirit Lake by the hands of Indians, who carried away his sister, then a child of eleven. His life has since been mainly devoted to a search for this child, and to killing Indians wherever he can find them. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 193

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A genteel stranger who turns out to be the frontier’s most prolific Indian killer, his whole life bent to one abduction-led vendetta — a ready-made novel’s central reveal.
• SHARE: Perfect for a friend who reads frontier history for the desperadoes — the Comanche Bill dining-room twist is a fact only that person would savor.
• DEEPTHINKING: The reader’s own courtesy toward Bill implicates her in whatever he has done; civility and atrocity ride side by side on the same stage road.