Stanley is the kind of enforcement officer who believes he's taming the frontier so it will be safe for women and children, but that women should not even know what forces threaten them. Martha, however, very much wants to know what happened to her friend at the hands of the Burns gang, especially when the butcher's wife tells her to ask her husband why the townspeople are looking at her askance. Finally Martha positions herself to overhear the truth her husband has refused to impart to her. When a mob gathers outside the prison to demand Mike's flogging, Martha lends her voice to the call for corporal "justice." Stanley has to step aside and let Mike be brought out for his 100 lashes; by the 39th bloody stroke Martha has fainted, and shortly afterwards the townspeople, nauseated by the sight they've demanded, disperse.

With Stanley you see a rough-hewn but basically decent man reaching for a new solution to the eternal problem of antisocial maleness. (Note that he's decent in his terms, not ours. His attitude toward the aboriginal population has not been made palatable to us in an anachronistic way; he is believably the kind of man he would have been given the time and place.) In his dealings with the Burns brothers, you see competing forms of aggressive masculinity, those that threaten and those that defend civilization.

Meanwhile Martha, the woman who has always been sheltered as a necessary component of being considered "decent," is exposed, as if for the first time in human history, to the facts of how men maintain the social order that protects women from outrages like that suffered by her friend. But ignorance has not made Martha more sensitive. She doesn't inherently, allegorically represent civilization, as the sheriff's woman often does in westerns, trying to hold him back from doing what a man has to do (i.e., kill the bad guys) and that the audience is slavering for. Martha goes to the jail, like everyone else, to call for Mike to be whipped. But it's as if she went there crying for vengeance and returned home with the stirrings of a moral philosopher.

There's more narrative pull than that might suggest, however. Martha's anxious curiosity about her friend's fate has a fairy tale quality, something like the story of Bluebeard's wife. We know Martha will move even closer to this fate than words or imagination before the end of the movie, and with her huge, luminous eyes in her piquant pug's face, Watson makes Martha seem the victim of a dark enchantment (which is how some women feel about sexual violence, the Angela Carter of The Bloody Chamber, for instance) without making her seem like anything but a young frontier matron. There's a beautiful, rapt moment in which Martha, sitting in the tub and seen from behind, tells the Captain of a dream she had of the murdered child. Watson's hands are as expressive here as her eyes are throughout.