To serve YOU.

To find a scapegoat and to find it to be mutual among your society is to know a Dionysian relief that, once indulged, rapidly caramelizes, rots, and gilds in a succession faster than the utterance of those words. It morphs from the tantric, self-loathing sweetness of your guiltiest pleasure to the pillared furnace of entitlement that stokes governments and explodes to fire wars. Your relieved guilt will be your exaltation! It will be your battle-cry! To know a man's villain is to know his heart—or at least its guide.

It is said Lewis Keseberg, the German—who once wanted to hang James Reed, the last man out, et cetera—was found surrounded by half-eaten mangled corpses, that he gave a recipe for eating brains, that he opened up a restaurant years later and sometimes dined on human flesh alone! They also say he took little Georgie Foster to bed with him one night and they next morning he was dead; they say he hung the little boy's corpse on the wall until he decided to eat it.

They say these things about Lewis Keseberg...

But perhaps they just needed a villain.

[He toasts something he does not speak and starts on his fresh cocktail.]

Those three Donner girls were now three orphans with only the blue and red coats on their backs; they each found homes soon enough, but they were orphans. Like Sherman. Like Charlotte—perhaps destined to marry men like me.

Their nine-year-old older cousin, Georgie, was taken in by a tavern-keeper who gave him free board; Robert Semple—my business partner who would one day sell my little white adobe out from under me—paid him a princely sum to deliver some of the newspapers he published so that the boy might save some money, yet might also learn honest work. I bought the boy his clothes until he reached adulthood—a fact which never appeared in Semple's paper of record...not that I ever wanted it known...

[He muses into his drink momentarily.]