Summary
In the dust-lashed mirage of Wolfville, Marshal ‘Dead Shot’ Baker—saint to the citizenry, scourge to the owlhoot trail—hunts a coyote-clever gang of stage-robbers beyond the town’s last prayer. A screaming coach, two abducted maidens, and a drunkard miner’s haughty daughter, Evelyn Baldwin, become the chessboard on which pride, poverty, and pistol-fire collide. Blood on the sage erases her father’s debts and her last excuse for idleness, yet Evelyn spurns wage and whiplash alike; Baker, spellbound, cuffs himself to her vanity with a ring. Enter the glib postmaster—ink where mettle should be—and the marshal’s heart turns to lead. Haunted by the mirror she holds, Baker courts annihilation, hurling his body off a cliff in a rustler’s ambush that reeks of self-arranged doom. Word of his fall detonates Evelyn’s dormant grit; she saddles a posse of scoffing cowhands, storms the heights, guns the outlaws into the ravines, drags her broken husband from the stones, and milks life back into his veins under the town’s stunned gaze. What began as a laconic horse-opera mutates into a raw parable of ego burned away until only love—scarred, humbled, equal—remains.
Synopsis
Intent upon ridding his town of crime, Dead Shot Baker, the beloved sheriff of Wolfville, drives a band of outlaws to the outskirts, where they hold up the stagecoach and carry two girls away to the hills. Baker and his posse overtake the bandits and rescue the girls, one of whom is the beautiful and willful Evelyn Baldwin, the daughter of a once wealthy miner who is now a penniless drunkard. Old Baldwin is killed in the battle and Evelyn, although penniless, refuses to work. Baker comes to her rescue and marries the girl, who then snubs him for the new postmaster. Feeling inferior to his wife, Baker invites death so that she may be free to marry the postmaster. Heading a posse against a band of notorious rustlers, Baker falls to his apparent death from a cliff. When news of her husband's death reaches Evelyn, she heads a posse back into the hills, routs the outlaws, finds her husband and nurses him back to health, thus winning the respect of the townspeople.
