Honeymoon Ranch

A Manhattan tenderfoot, nursing dime-store dreams of sagebrush romance, descends from the iron serpent onto a sun-scorched platform where dust devils waltz with locomotive steam; across that shimmering haze he beholds Margaret Davis—legs like colt pistols, eyes the color of desert lightning—who in sixty surreal minutes will mutate from unattainable mirage to shotgun bride. Before the poor sap can even loosen his starched collar, six-gun kin hustle him into a mercenary matrimony, the chapel a splintered corral smelling of kerosene, sweat, and old regrets. What follows is a savage pastoral ballet: the groom must outwit, out-punch, and out-love an entire clan of grudge-nursing ranch hands while the bride oscillates between pawn and provocateur, her loyalty auctioned to the highest heartbeat. Bullets punctuate vows, fists replace kisses, and the horizon itself seems to grin at the spectacle of urban innocence fed through the threshing machine of frontier appetite.