Get Your Man

Deep beneath the granite ribs of the Scottish Lowlands, Jock MacTier’s pickaxe rings like a funeral bell for a love already buried: Margaret MacPherson, whose glance once scorched the pit-head fog, now coolly affixes her future to Arthur Whitman’s ledger of promises. Their wedding is a study in anthracite and lace—coal dust drifting across the chapel like penance while the paymaster’s gold watch ticks louder than any organ chord. Jock’s subsequent descent into the flooded seam is less a rescue than a baptism in black water; he surfaces clutching the life of the very man who stole his own, then exiles himself to the Dominion’s white infinity where the northern lights hiss like thrown acid. In Canada, the former miner swaps soot for starlight, trading the coal’s subterranean cathedral for a horizon so vast it seems to crack the sky. Enter Lenore De Marney, a sable-wrapped enigma whose father traffics contraband pelts beneath the Mounties’ crimson noses; her eyes hold the same glacial blue Jock once saw reflected in Scottish lochs, yet here the ice never thaws. When Arthur, now a fugitive embezzler, slithers out of the Atlantic fog to fleece the smuggler’s cache, the triangle re-ignites—no longer a parochial tug-of-war over a woman but a moral geometry measured in snow-crusted blood. Gunfire stitches the boreal dusk; Lenore’s father collapses, his final breath crystallizing mid-air while Jock’s scarlet tunic drinks the dusk like a wound absorbing dusk. The widow-to-be does not weep; instead she helps the Mountie shackle her father’s killer, sealing the cycle that began in a Fife colliery and ends on a frozen river where bridal auroras ripple like wedding veils.