A Hickory Hick

A bucolic newlywed pair—he a gullible hayseed clutching a dowry of soil-encrusted savings, she a bright-eyed prairie songbird—alight upon the chromium metropolis, its skyline a rack of glittering hypodermics promising instant fortune. Seduced by a cabal of sharp-suited petro-grifters, the lad sinks every red cent into phantom derricks, while his bride, left to marinate in neon solitude, boards the Trip-to-Heaven railway, a cliff-hugging funicular whose name alone smells of mortality. Believing himself utterly excised from the ledger of the living, the farmer stages a black-comic danse macabre: pistol misfires, noose frays, gas-meter jams—each suicide a vaudeville pratfall. Yet providence, half sleight-of-hand and half nickelodeon, restores spouse and purse alike, the swindlers clapped in irons as the curtain falls on a marriage re-inked in slapstick grace.