Summary
A granite-jawed jurist who once dispensed gallows verdicts as casually as cufflinks finds the noose tightening around his own neck after a midnight scuffle leaves his brother motionless on the library rug. Camden McClure—part Solomon, part Jekyll—bolts westward into the sun-cracked void, hiring laconic tracker Cal Nelson as his Virgil in reverse. Heatwaves warp the air like molten glass; guilt corrodes the judge’s innards faster than any alkali dust. When a half-dead schoolmarm named Mary Jackson materializes from the mirage, the caravan becomes a rolling tribunal: two liars, one reluctant confessor, and a horizon that refuses to absolve anyone. Sunstroke peels away McClure’s last pretense of probity; he babbles the murder to Mary, who—out of pity, perversity, or both—claims a bloodstain of her own. Their macabre nuptial pact shatters when newspapers insist the brother still breathes. Duty reasserts itself with surgical cruelty: the judge claps his bride-to-be in irons, only to learn that the headlines lied, that mercy was merely postponed, and that the desert always collects its surcharges in bones. A sandblast of biblical proportions buries the gavel-wielder while Cal and Mary—now cleansed by the same grit that entombs their pursuer—ride toward an uncertain dawn, absolved not by courtrooms but by the indifferent charity of sagebrush and stars.
Synopsis
Judge of the Circuit Court, Camden McClure is a extremist advocate of law enforcement until he kills his brother during a fight. Fleeing from his crime, the judge hires Cal Nelson as his guide through the Western badlands. While crossing the desert, they meet Mary Jackson, who is lost and exhausted. Mary recovers, but the judge suffers heat stroke and, in his delirium, confesses his crime to Mary. To ease his guilt, Mary admits that she is a murderer, too, and the couple decide to get married. However, when the judge reads that his brother is alive, he once again adheres to the letter of the law and denounces Mary to the authorities. Cal, who has fallen in love with Mary, carries her to the desert to escape the sheriff, and there Mary admits that she fabricated her crime to relieve the judge. The judge then discovers that his brother is actually dead, and follows the fugitives into the desert, but is killed in a sandstorm, thus freeing Mary to wed Cal.
