Summary
On the parched edge of a forgotten Texas nowhere, Christine Brent—her name already a rusted bell—lives in a cabin that time uses as an ashtray. Maurice Maxwell, a Manhattan Minotaur in a mohair suit, arrives with teeth like courthouse steps and a bankroll fat enough to gag conscience; he courts her with promises gilded in arsenic. She spurns him, her pulse flaring instead for Carl Randolph, a fugitive who stumbles through her door trailing gun-smoke and jingoistic guilt after avenging a slurred star-spangled banner. Christine presses crumpled dollars into his cracked palm and whispers, “Go east—outrun the shadow.” The fates answer with a scaffold: her father’s back shattered beneath a runaway wagon, his limbs now compass-roses pointing only to bedpan and debt. She barters herself to Maxwell, a virgin betrothed to a ledger. One dawn she finds her father’s cooling body dangling from a rafter, his final refusal to be collateral. In New York’s vertical Babel she becomes the tycoon’s porcelain trophy, every hallway a tribunal of leers. Maxwell, ever the connoisseur of misery, filches Brinkeroff’s thunder-motor patent and silences the genius with a silk garrote; Metta Brinkeroff, widowed but unbowed, infiltrates the marble lair as scullery sleuth, recording the killer’s bourbon-soaked boasts on the phonograph of memory. When justice snoozes, she unsheathes a kitchen blade and carves Maxwell’s confession across his throat. A jury of weary women sets her free. The blood dries, the papers flutter, and Christine—her dowry now grief—walks into the winter dawn with Carl, both of them poorer, freer, and ferociously alive.
Synopsis
Christine Brent, living with her father in a small Texas town, is wooed by Maurice Maxwell, an unscrupulous New York businessman. Christine rejects Maxwell's advances, befriending instead Carl Randolph, a young man who seeks refuge in her cabin after shooting a Mexican for insulting the American flag. Christine gives Carl money and advises him to go East, which he does. Left helpless after her father is injured in a crippling accident, Christine agrees to marry Maxwell so that her father can live in comfort. Brent, however, demoralized, kills himself and soon after, Maxwell and Christine move to New York. Stung by her husband's constant abuse, Christine learns to hate Maxwell, and when Maxwell hires Carl, now a successful attorney, as his counsel, Christine feels her old love rekindled. Unscrupulous as ever, Maxwell robs the inventor Brinkeroff of a valuable patent, and then murders him. Brinkeroff's wife Metta, suspecting Maxwell of her husband's murder, secures a job in the Maxwell home to obtain evidence against him. Her prudence is rewarded when she overhears Maxwell admit to the crime, and outraged, she kills him but is acquitted by a sympathetic jury. All obstacles now cleared from their path, Christine and Carl begin a new life together.
