Morality plays. Character studies. Life-lessons. We watched a television episode of Wagon Train from the early 60s. My head is still spinning.
The story wasn’t told in this order, but this is what it was about. Two youngsters, squeezing bleeding hands together, swearing “blood brothers”. Later in life, one losing his sight, they both fell in love with the same woman. The discord resulted in a gunfight in the woman’s room, and she was shot and killed. The hero of the story was so true to his blood-brother commitment that he didn’t tell his going-blind friend that he hadn’t even drawn his gun. The woman was killed by a ricochet off a brass bed post from the going-blind guy’s gun when he shot and missed. The good guy didn’t tell his friend, who turned out to be the bad guy, so he, the friend, wouldn’t feel bad. He was that devoted a blood brother.
The result is that the other guy continued to go blind and spent the rest of his life searching for, and plotting revenge against, the blood brother who killed his woman. In the final confrontation, years later, wouldn’t you know, the good guy never pulled his gun and the bad blind guy shot at him, missed, and got killed by his own ricochet off a rock.
And the moral is…