Summary
In a smoke-curdled Paris salon, the immaculate manservant Ruggles—creaseless as a duke’s conscience—becomes the casual spoil of a poker hand dealt by Egbert Floud, a nouveau-riche Coloradan whose spurs jingle like loose change. Shipped across the Atlantic in steerage that smells of iron and contraband cheese, the valet lands in Red Gap, a lumber-rough town where log cabins rub shoulders with false-front palaces of painted pine. There, corseted matrons guzzle tea from chipped gravy boats while discussing Dante in accents thick as sorghum, and cowboys quote Swinburne between shots of redeye. Ruggles, expecting servitude, instead becomes the unlikely Virgil for these frontier vulgarians: he teaches them the difference between a bouillabaisse and a bait bucket, between a sonnet and a branding iron. When the debt-ridden Earl of Brinstead arrives to pry his feckless brother from Klondike Kate—a flamboyant siren whose diamonds weigh more than her morals—Ruggles must decide whether dignity is a waistcoat one can simply unbutton. The story crests in a boisterous Independence Day banquet where plum pudding duels with corn on the cob, and a butler’s bow becomes the arc that flips an entire social order on its sunburned head.
Synopsis
Harry Leon Wilson has written nothing more diverting than this story of the irreproachable English valet who is lost in a poker game to a rough-and-ready westerner and taken to Red Gap ultimately to become its social mentor and chief caterer, and there is sheer delight in the story of how the Earl, brought over to save his younger brother from the vampirish clutches of Klondike Kate, makes the lady his Countess and once more stands Red Gap upon its somewhat dizzy head.
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