Summary
A sun-scorched gulch, christened with brimstone humor as Hell’s Crater, swallows two years of Jim Shamrick’s marrow; pick-ax swings echo like slow heartbeats against the granite ribcage of the Sierra Nevada. One dusk, he trades his calloused future for a night of tarantella and tarantula-bite whiskey inside Bill Gordon’s pine-plank pleasure palace. The hall’s kerosene chandeliers drip shadows onto Cherry Maurice’s kohl-rimmed smile—an atlas of deceit—while Gordon’s pianist hammers out a can-can that sounds like a death-knell. By dawn, Shamrick’s poke of dust has vanished into silk-lined pockets; the camp’s auriferous fever reveals its true face: a bacchanal of fleecing. Retribution arrives not with a six-gun’s bark but with the cold deliberation of a man who has measured the worth of a soul in ounces of gold: Jim kidnaps Cherry, drags her into the vertiginous abyss of his claim, and sentences her to a year of chipping quartz under the eye of a merciless sun. The gulch, once silent, now reverberates with pick strikes and the slow thaw of loathing. Muscles blister, petticoats shred, and something feral yet luminous germinates between jailer and captive. When the first winter snow whitewashes the diggings, she no longer flinches from his gaze; she returns it, equal in ferocity. Come spring, the crucible of forced labor has transmuted coercion into covenant: they stand together before a frontier preacher, exchanging vows while the cradle still rocks with auriferous promise.
Synopsis
During the days of the California gold rush, Jim Shamrick toils on his claim, Hell's Crater, for two years and then decides to enjoy himself in a nearby mining camp. Bill Gordon, the owner of the local dance hall, gets Jim drunk and then, with the aid of Cherry Maurice, robs him. When the prospector realizes what has happened, he abducts Cherry and forces her to labor in his mine for a year. Though nearly broken by the hard work, Cherry comes to love Jim and eventually marries him.
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