Summary
A blood-slick cradle rocks in the embered silence of a frontier cabin; out of the charnel of a settler massacre an eagle’s aerie becomes both crib and cathedral for the orphaned Jack Trail. The Silsbees—Swedish iron-worker Jonas and his violin-toting wife Ingrid—spirit the infant into the granite lungs of the Bitterroot range, carving a cosmology of copper feathers and glacier light where guilt is measured in melted snow. Meanwhile, down-valley, Geoffrey Milford—part entrepreneur, part carrion—ghostwrites destiny by counterfeiting the dead father’s signature, siphoning ore revenue into a gilded mirage. Years ossify like pine resin: Jack, now a taciturn demigod of shale and spruce, haunts the same ridges that once sheltered him, while Milford’s brittle heiress, Rose, grows up clutching lace promises and rumors of a savage guardian angel. Enter Robert Blasedon, a velvet-gloved predator whose obsession with Rose is only eclipsed by his hunger for the title deeds that will cement a railway dynasty. A thunderbolt coach-ride, a matriarch’s sacrificial spiral onto a pickaxe, a hasty marriage traded for a lover’s life—each beat lands like flint on steel. The final act is a vertiginous ascent through cataracts and snowmelt, where two men claw across a rope bridge of moral rot; one plummets into a ravine’s carnivorous maw, the other reclaims nothing but the woman whose gaze once weighed more than bullion. In the closing iris, ownership itself is renounced: papers burn, eagles wheel overhead, and love is declared the only negotiable currency left in a land gutted by forgery and fire.
Synopsis
The sole survivor of an Indian massacre, a baby called Jack Trail, is raised in the shadow of an overhanging eagle's nest by the Silsbees, two immigrants. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Milford, the partner of Jack's deceased father, forges his signature to use money from his property. Years later, Milford's partner, Robert Blasedon, desiring to marry Milford's daughter Rose, who rejected him, seeks to recover the papers and force the marriage. After Jack saves the Milfords and Blasedon from a runaway coach, Mrs. Silsbee, while trying to protect Rose from Blasedon, is killed in a scuffle. Accused of the murder, Jack, who now loves Rose, saves her from Blasedon, but Rose marries Blasedon when he threatens to kill Jack. After Blasedon steals the forged papers, Jack pursues him through the mountains until their struggle ends in Blasedon's fall into a ravine. When Milford learns of Jack's origin, he offers the papers, which Jack declines, saying that Rose is all the wealth he wants.
