Hard Luck

A lone tramp, gaunt as a winter scarecrow, drifts toward the gallows of despair on a sun-baked country road; the noose he fashions from frayed clothesline snaps, hurling him into the dust like a discarded marionette. Fate, capricious as ever, reroutes him through a carnival of absurdities: he filches a wallet from a bullet-riddled pickpocket, courts a razor-slashing ingenue amid opium-parlor shadows, and stumbles into a den of bourbon-soaked cutthroats who gamble human teeth for sport. Each comic misadventure tightens the cosmic vise—wealth becomes ruin, flirtation becomes vendetta—until a final, delirious chase hurtles him toward a circus lion, a runaway zeppelin, and a baptism in the mad river of existence itself.