After a commercial break, the horse thief is finally cut down from the gallows. His corpse lands in the mud with an unceremonious splash. Cullen frantically levers up the next nail. He yanks hard on his chains and pulls up the floorboard. He pulls up another board, and another, racing against time as the Swede approaches the car once more. He drops through the hole to the rail below, grabbing his hat as he goes. Once outside, he blends in with all the other filthy workers by holding his hat over his chains.

En route to Hell on Wheels, Doc gives some helpful story tips to the reporter. "Write this down," he says, and proceeds to dictate the entire story to him, playing up the savage nature of the attackers and the Christianity of the poor white souls who were lost. He goes on. "Amongst the murdered were Robert Bell, visionary surveyor of the Union Pacific Railroad, his beautiful wife Lily." Doc thinks for a moment, and is then struck by an idea. He christens Lily as "the fair-haired Maiden of the West [who] was sullied by the savage pack and carried off into slavery in their filthy camp." Flies buzz around him, attracted either to the corpses in the wagon beside them or the plentiful crap Doc is serving up. The reporter looks dubious, but takes notes. Doc goes on about how his railroad will bring civilization to the West. Lily represents civilization, he says. The reporter realizes Doc wants to use his story as a sort of rallying cry to bring out the federal troops to "clear out the savages." Saving Lily would be nice, too.

Lily is just waking up behind her magical fallen tree. She's woozy and momentarily disoriented. She winces with every move, clutching her bloodied hand to her body. She peers over the tree and sees the smoldering remains of the Cheyennes' abandoned campfire. She stumbles to what's left of the fire and drops to her knees in front of it. She gives it a long, despairing look, knowing what she has to do next. I thought she was going to cauterize her wounds, but perhaps the embers aren't hot enough for that, and that's why she seems so disappointed. So she does something even more drastic. She unbuttons her blouse and gets a look at the raw, gaping wound in her left shoulder. She pries a bit of whalebone from her corset and uses her teeth to sharpen its dull edge. From her coat she unravels a length of thread and binds it to one end of her makeshift needle. With a heavenward glance, she proceeds to sew up her own wound. The deed done, she falls to the ground in dead faint.