Buckshot John

Summary

Dust-caked perdition sprawls beneath a sodium sun as Sheriff Amos Holt’s posse—spurs clacking like castanets of doom—corners Bad Jake Kennedy’s outlaws beside a bone-dry arroyo; bullets scrawl coppery calligraphy across the sky, and when the smoke sloughs away only Buckshot John remains, lips stitched shut by outlaw loyalty. Thirty calendar-pages of penitentiary mildew grind past; half-way to oblivion, a tent-revival thunderclap of repentance detonates inside his ribcage, and the gaunt bandit resolves to barter cartographic confession for celestial pardon. Enter The Great Gilmore, a top-hatted mountebank whose crystal ball is as hollow as his promises; with spiritualist hocus-pocus he milks the secret map from John’s fractured conscience. The moment the charlatan’s patent-leather boots strike pay-dirt, John’s enlightenment curdles into venomous wrath—he punches daylight out of Yuma Territorial, hitches a midnight freight, and gallops toward a reckoning drenched in kerosene lamplight and spent powder.

Synopsis

A sheriff and his posse shoot it out with a gang of robbers headed by Bad Jake Kennedy. The surviving robber, Buckshot John, won't tell where the gang's loot is hidden and gets 30 years in prison. Halfway through his sentence he "gets religion" and in order to save his soul, decides to tell where the gang has hidden its stash of gold. However, a phony clairvoyant, The Great Gilmore, finds out about John's intentions and tricks him into revealing where the gold is. When John finds out what happened, he decides to break out of prison and take care of matters himself.