Summary
A dust-laden odyssey unfurls when a weather-bitten prospector, pockets still glinting with Yukon dust, strides back into the pine-scented hush of his frontier cabin only to find it hollowed of breath: wife and infant vanished, abducted by a cardsharp whose grin is as polished as the ivory chips he once rattled across green felt. What follows is less a linear chase than a spiral of mirrored abandonments—the husband’s vengeance-track drags him through saloon lamplight and river-bottom fog, past a red-corseted dancer whose nickname “No Man’s Woman” is both boast and scar-tissue. She, too, has been discarded by the same gambler, Cullen, now skulking in the margins like a coyote that has lost taste for its own reflection. In an ironic twist of maternal transference, the dancer nurses the dying wife, absorbs her whispered testament, then swaddles the orphan as though kinship were a garment to be refitted. When the wanderer finally confronts Cullen in a haze of kerosene and accordion music, the child’s piping voice—”Daddy Cullen!”—collapses every moral scaffold: paternity becomes a roulette wheel, bullets fly from a bystander nursing older grudges, and the victor discovers that home is not reclaimed through blood but through the quiet act of staying.
Synopsis
On his return from an adventure in the gold fields, a young Westerner returns to his home only to learn that his wife and child had been taken away by a gambler named Cullen. He vows to seek revenge and starts out in search for them. In his search he meets a dance hall belle, touted 'no man's woman.' Meanwhile Cullen has deserted the girl and child. The dance hall belle, while trying to save another neighbor's child, finds herself nursing the wronged woman. The wanderer reaches the home, but the wronged woman recognizing him, tells the dancer her story and then dies. The dancer takes the child to her home, and she loses the respect of her friends. The wanderer arrives at the saloon just in time to save her from Cullen, but ridicules her on learning that she is a dance hall performer. Cullen is persistent in his wooing, appeals to the wanderer with whom she has fallen in love fail. In a final effort the girl brings the child to the saloon so that she might win him. The child on seeing Cullen rushes to him and calls him 'Daddy Cullen.' The wanderer realizing he has finally met his man proceeds to punish him. A bystander who had a grudge against Cullen shoots him. Realizing that the dance hall girl had been a good mother to his child, the wanderer decides to settle down and all ends happily. Exhibitor's Trade Review, 1921.
Review Excerpt
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