Summary
A soot-choked frontier crucible, where ore-dust hangs like vertiginous incense above a half-lit boomtown, becomes the amphitheatre for Ethel Kendall’s marital odyssey. She steps from the night-train’s iron maw swaddled in city tweed, clutching a daguerreotype of a spouse who may already be carrion, and is instantly ensnared by Butch Dorgan’s cabaret—a gin-soaked purgatory of sawdust, spittoons, and leering brass. Enter Frank Worthing, a laconic mining magnate whose declared misogyny is the town’s favorite running joke; he yanks Ethel from the carnivorous waltz, deposits her in a lace-curtained boarding house, and swears an oath as brittle as quartz: safe passage, nothing more. Yet every pickaxe clang, every subterranean blast, seems to mock that vow. When the pair ride to a neighboring camp to consult an engineer friend, the earth itself rebels: a man-made slide, detonated by Dorgan’s paid saboteurs, entombs them in a cathedral of darkness. Air thins, candles gutter, and the unspoken detonates—love professed between coughs of dust. Rescue arrives; a hasty frontier marriage follows, predicated on the presumed death of Husband Alpha. But fate keeps two aces up its sleeve: Dorgan’s thirst for vengeance and the revenant appearance of Colter—alias Kendall—who strides from the shadows, very much alive, revolver glinting like a wedding ring forged in hell. The final shoot-out is a staccato ballet of muzzle flashes and ricocheting regrets; when the smoke clears, both villains sprawl in the same ochre mud that once paid their wages, leaving Frank and Ethel to stagger into a sunrise that feels less like closure than a dare.
Synopsis
Ethel Kendall arrives at a mining town in search of her husband and is rescued from "Butch" Dorgan's disreputable cabaret by Frank Worthing, a declared woman-hater, and delivered to a respectable lodging. Worthing promises to see Ethel to her destination safely and makes an enemy of Dorgan. In a neighboring town, Ethel and Frank visit an engineer friend, and while examining a mine shaft they are trapped by a slide instigated by Dorgan's men. With death before them, Ethel and Frank confess their love; then, believing her husband to be dead, she marries him after they are saved. Dorgan and Colter, the latter an alias for Ethel's first husband, are killed in a gun battle, and all ends happily.
