A sequence of cross-cut scenes showing Phil's funeral and Peter Gordon reading a Bible verse alone in his pristine room.
Peter's calculated murder of Phil represents the quiet, ruthless triumph of modern, educated specialization over archaic manual labor. He uses a medical textbook and surgical gloves to safely handle the anthrax-infected hide, slipping it under his bed with chilling detachment. He does not win a physical brawl; he weaponizes biological knowledge. This subtle assassination proves that the brute force of the working cowboy is ultimately defenseless against the cold, clinical precision of the emerging professional class.
The editing in the final moments is chillingly methodical, cross-cutting between the somber reality of Phil's funeral and Peter sitting calmly in his pristine room. The cuts are slow and deliberate, matching Peter's own unhurried, calculating nature. As he reads the titular Bible verse, the camera slowly pushes in on his completely unreadable face, allowing the horrifying realization of his premeditated crime to wash over the audience without a single word of confession.
Peter secures his family's freedom by stepping entirely outside the bounds of conventional morality. Watching his mother and George happily embrace from his window, he smiles faintly, entirely unburdened by the guilt of having committed murder. He accepts that ensuring their survival required a monstrous act, embracing his role as a necessary executioner. His quiet satisfaction suggests a terrifying liberation, where ethical rules are discarded the moment they threaten the safety of the ones he loves.
The film's final sequence revealing Peter's actions reinterprets the novel's ambiguous ending, transforming it into a chilling tale of queer survival and calculated revenge. This cinematic adaptation functions as a palimpsest, where the new text is written over the original, yet traces of the source remain visible. Visual cues, such as Peter handling the toxic rawhide with gloves, explicitly confirm his murder of Phil, an authorial inscription that alters the narrative's tragic repression into a decisive act of vengeance.