Steinbeck's "The Flight"

I thought that this story was very sad. I felt that Pepe should have lived a long life. The story was basically about a young man named Pepe that had not yet became a man. Pepe soon has to go to town for his mother and gets into a fight with a man and stabs him with a knife that his father gave him. He panics and goes by his house to get some things and then heads up the mountain. Pepe does not know that friends of the guy that he stabbed are following him. They shoot him and a piece of the metal goes into his hand. It eventually gets infected and he dies. It was a very sad ending and I did not like the way that it ended. It is like the bad guy wins and the young innocent boys loses.