Summary
A lone locomotive screams across a sun-bleached nowhere, pistons hammering like guilt itself—inside, J.B. Warner’s nameless fireman cradles a valise stuffed with dynamite and a single photograph of Flora Braidwood’s lighthouse-keeper, whose lantern once guided sailors but now lures only ruin. Warner, soot-smeared and Pentecostal-eyed, leaps from the cab into a dust storm of rumor: a silver vein, a crooked assay office, a syndicate of masked notaries fronting for Edward Burns’s velvet-voiced railroad baron. Bill Patton’s one-armed ex-sheriff shadows him, harmonica breathing out funeral chords while he reloads his carbine with broken oaths. They trek through a frontier that feels chewed rather than mapped—arroyos like gnawed bones, mesquite clutching at the sky with arthritic fingers—until they reach a half-built township whose main street is only two façades and a prayer. Inside the tarpaper saloon, Braidwood sings a murdered miner’s ballad; her voice cracks the kerosene hush, summoning Burns from his private car where he keeps ledgers inked in human collateral. Warner challenges him to a duel measured not in bullets but in deeds: whoever first brings running water to the drought-blighted settlers may claim the land. Burns counters by importing a carnival of false hope—slot machines, patent medicines, a phalanx of lawyers who can deed the moon to a man already buried. Patton, discovering his own signature forged on eviction papers, burns the documents in the lantern’s flame and watches the ash rise like black snow. Meanwhile, Herbert Frank’s consumptive telegrapher taps out a confession in Morse that no one alive can decode, his key clicking faster than his hemorrhaging lungs. The climax arrives during a midnight cloudburst: Warner sprints along the trestle, valise in hand, while Burns’s private train thunders forward, headlamp a Cyclops eye. Braidwood stands on the cow-catcher, arms outstretched, a semaphore of absolution; Warner hurls the valise into the boiler, the explosion blooming outward in a chrysanthemum of fire and steam that silhouettes the entire cast against the night. When the smoke clears, the tracks twist skyward like interrogation marks, the river now free to flow beneath them; survivors limp away, pockets empty but eyes newly washed by rain.
Synopsis
