Ain't Love Grand?

Ainters of carefree youth fracture against the vertiginous Rockies when a weekend lark—blankets of spruce, cheap gin, ukuleles under star-glut—mutates into baroque ordeal. The object of twin devotions, a sylph with thorn-rose lips, is abducted by a mountain jackal whose beard drips campfire tallow; the posse’s mirth curdles. Billy, hitherto their clown, a whipping-post for sarcasm, vaults from fool to avenging mercury, scaling crags while moonlight carves his silhouette into legend. What begins as triangle-of-desire farce ends in chiaroscuro chase: hooves on scree, lantern constellations, a final pistol crack echoing like split granite. The bandit plummets; the girl’s gaze, once aloof, now rinsed with awe, rewrites Billy’s social orbit. The forest exhales pine and gunpowder; the survivors descend altered, innocence cauterized, hearts branded by the iron of their own cruelty.