Summary
A consumptive patriarch and his obstinate daughter—Nada Mayhew—decamp to an alpine nowhere, hoping thin air will cauterize the old man’s hemorrhaging lungs; instead, they inhale a miasma of distrust when bootleggers Bob Clark and Jim Hendricks mistake the convalescents for revenuers. A brittle parchment—half map, half fever dream—promises a lode of virgin silver snaking beneath the granite, so father and daughter trade sanatoriums for pickaxes, trailed by felons who covet both ore and incrimination. Their exodus becomes a helter-skelter stampede toward the mirage of Ghost City, a boomtown gutted by greed and ghosted by time. Mid-flight, Nada stumbles upon surveyor Dick Carroll’s cabin, trusses him like a turkey under the delusion he’s gang, then watches her certainty combust when Hendricks storms in, brandishing not answers but a bottle of wood alcohol that doubles as poison and pyromaniac. While flames lick the rafters, Nada chews through Dick’s knots with feral desperation; Hendricks, blinded by agony, topples into his own bonfire. Smoke, silver, and survival braid together as the trio—now uneasy confederates—bolt from the inferno, the map singed but legible, the mountain still humming with subterranean treasure. In the final reel, Dick subdues the smoldering Hendricks, Nada buries her father’s fragility beneath a quilt of snow, and the two heirs of a broken frontier ride off not into sunset but into a pewter dawn, chasing a vein that may be only moonlight calcified in stone.
Synopsis
Nada Mayhew persuades her sick father to spend a few months in the mountains, where they are mistakenly suspected as being federal agents by bootleggers Bob Clark and Jim Hendricks. Using a map that Nada found, she and her father set out in search of a hidden vein of silver, but they must make a wild ride to Ghost City to escape the gang, who also wish to find the silver. When surveyor Dick Carroll finds Nada in his cabin, Nada assumes that he is one of the gang and ties him up. Jim Hendricks arrives and captures Nada. Realizing her mistake, Nada gnaws at Dick's bonds while Hendricks searches for the map, accidentally drinks poison, and causes a fire in his agony. All three escape. Dick overcomes Hendricks, and Nada and Dick start out in search of the vein.
