Revenge

A prim Eastern silhouette, Alva Leigh, glides off the Union-Pacific coach into Magnet’s dust-choked boomtown hours after her fiancé’s blood has cooled on the saloon floor. The town’s heartbeat is mercury, not iron: lynch-mood swings, whiskey confessions, a piano that only knows funeral marches. Donald Jaffray’s corpse still holds a secret—his killer, the gun-velvet charmer “Sudden” Duncan, wears the victim’s ring on a chain around his neck, a private trophy. To cauterize suspicion, Duncan pins the deed on Donald’s taciturn partner, Dick Randall, a prospector whose eyes already contain the alkaline glaze of a man trekking toward death. Alva, drunk on grief, swears an oath that tastes of iron; she will cross the continent of her own sorrow to find the supposed murderer and flay him with her derringer. Instead, she becomes an unwitting Hermes of doom: she bores a pin-prick in Randall’s canteen so that every glug of presumed poison trickles into the sand, not his gut. The Mojave thus becomes a moral ledger—each drop lost is a second chance she does not yet know she is granting. Back in Magnet, Tiger Lil’, a dance-hall Virgil with mascara like war-paint, unspools the truth in a jealous hiss: Duncan, not Randall, squeezed the trigger. Alva’s vengeance pivots on its axis; she gallops into a white-hot horizon that shimmers like a mirage of absolution. Behind her, Tiger Lil’ plants a bullet in Duncan’s black heart beneath a naphtha chandelier, the piano finally striking a major chord. The desert, impartial as deity, returns a man to the woman who tried to kill him; they marry in the skeletal shadow of a stamp mill, ring forged from a bullet casing, love tempered less by forgiveness than by shared culpability.