Summary
On a moon-pale Christmas Eve, an orphaned girl, Joan, slips the iron leash of a tyrannical mistress and drifts like a snowflake onto the lamplit portico of the White estate, where tuberculosis has turned young Rodney into a living ghost. One whispered promise—tomorrow can still burn brighter than the star atop the tree—stops his pistol mid-air; together they flee eastward into the cobalt vastness of the frontier, chaperoned by Aunt Prudence’s parasol and the wheeze of Rodney’s one good lung. Beneath buttes that resemble shattered cathedrals they stumble upon Major Philips trading firewater for Lakota souls; the villain, scenting exposure, dispatches the half-breed renegade Chawa to silence the boy and bag the girl. A bullet meant for the heart merely kisses Rodney’s rib, and while Joan is dragged through sandstone labyrinths, a reclusive physician who dialogues more with ravens than with people nurses the poet-patient back to breath. The final rescue is staged at dusk, when the sky itself seems to bleed indigo: Rodney, no longer pallid, strides through sagebrush smoke, disarms Chawa with the same trembling hand that once cradled a suicide note, and finds in Joan’s eyes the first clean air his lungs have ever tasted. Love, like the frontier, turns out to be less a destination than a horizon that keeps receding yet somehow cures them both.
Synopsis
On Christmas Eve, the orphaned Joan escapes a cruel mistress and finds refuge at the White family estate. After Joan convinces young Rodney White, who suffers from white plague, not to take his own life, he takes her out West, along with his Aunt Prudence, in hopes of recovering his health. There they learn that Major Philips is selling whiskey at an Indian settlement. Threatened by the discovery, Philips hires the renegade Chawa to kill Rodney and kidnap Joan. Rodney is only injured, however, and he recovers with the aid of the hermit Dr. Norman. After rescuing Joan from her kidnapper, Rodney learns that he is cured, and he and Joan fall in love.
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