Summary
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.
Synopsis
Easterner Alva Leigh arrives in the mining town of Magnet just after her fiancé, Donald Jaffray, has been murdered. Because Alva has sworn vengeance, "Sudden" Duncan, the real murderer, accuses Donald's partner, Dick Randall, of the crime. Knowing that Dick is planning a journey across the desert, Duncan fills his canteen with poison, but Alva, who also is determined to kill Dick, drills a hole in the canteen so that the water will drain out. After Dick's departure, Alva learns from "Tiger Lil'," who is jealous of Duncan's attention to the Eastern newcomer, that it was Duncan who killed Donald. Frantic, Alva immediately mounts a horse and rides into the desert to save the man she now recognizes as her true love. Tiger Lil' shoots Duncan in a dance hall quarrel, and Alva marries Dick.
