Summary
In a soot-choked frontier town where the mine’s maw swallows daylight, Big Jim Garrity—colossus of coal, titan of steam—reigns over lodes and lives like a vengeful Jehovah. His Eden is subterranean, black-lunged, humming with pick-song, until Hugh Malone, serpent-slick, slithers in with snow-bright cocaine to barter for muscle and soul. Garrity’s ultimatum—cease or be crushed—echoes through the shafts; Malone answers with dynamite, a midnight bloom of flame, and one dead miner whose blood brands Jim the killer. Shackles, courtrooms, a prison yard under blinding sun: the king is toppled, caged, then gone, vanished across oceans. Years erode names and faces; only the mountain remembers. Returning like a ghost fitted for his own bones, Jim drifts through the same gutters that once feared his footfall, only to collide with Malone, older, gaunter, still wearing damnation like a boutonniere. Fate, a pitiless dramatist, squeezes both men into one final frame where past and present detonate in a reckoning neither expected yet both have rehearsed since the first spark touched fuse.
Mine owner Big Jim Garrity discovers that Hugh Malone is selling cocaine to his miners. He warns Malone to stop, but Malone refuses. He then decides to destroy the mine in order to get rid of Garyity. A miner is killed and Malone frames Jim for the death. Jim is imprisoned, but escapes and flees the country. He returns years later and, through a twist of fate, runs into his old enemy Malone.
