The Gentleman from Indiana

The sprockets unspool a prairie tempest in which gridiron demigod John Harkless, trading shoulder pads for ink-stained cuffs, purchases the wheezing Plattville Herald and turns its pages into a battering ram against graft; a peripatetic circus rolls in like a gilt mirage, its midway booths teeming with stacked roulette wheels and rigged poker crates, their lacquered smiles camouflaging a hydra-headed racket that bleeds dry the hayseed wallets of Shelby County. Harkless, nostrils flared with moral chlorine, torches the operation in print, only to be waylaid beneath a blood-red moon by White-Cap bravos who fracture his ribs with axe handles and leave his crumpled silhouette for the buzzards. Rumor of his death ricochets, summoning a pitchforked citizenry whose grief ferments into lynch-lust; yet the editor, half-maimed but unbeaten, stirs alive on a surgeon’s cot while Helen Sherwood—his inamorata equal parts Gibson-girl grace and Boadicean mettle—commandeers the pressroom, typesetting a coup that catapults her convalescing lover toward a congressional seat.