The Widow's Might

Dick Tavis, a Manhattan gadabout with the attention span of a hummingbird, purchases a sun-scorched Wyoming spread because a stock-tip whispered over bootleg gin convinces him that bovine gold lies in the marrow of the prairie. The cowboy mirage—dusty sunsets, stampedes, the mythic lowing of cash-cow herds—shrivels into blistered monotony once the first blizzard erases the romance. One winter dusk, frostbitten and listless, he pins a crimson-edged advertising calendar above the pot-bellied stove; the lithograph girl, half Venus-half Gibson, returns his gaze with ink-stamped promise. Her eyes ignite a reckless pilgrimage that drags him from sagebrush to spa chandeliers, from saloon poker to ballroom masquerade. The girl proves to be flesh: the orphaned heiress Hope Merriweather, ward of the same huckster who palmed off a barren ranch on Dick. Revenge, courtship, and farce entangle—Dick dons bombazine and feathered hat, becomes the widowed "Mrs. Devere" at a Saratoga-style hydropathic palace, collects a court of panting suitors, and engineers a sting that strips the uncle down to his diamond studs. Cattle, calendar, corsets, and comeuppance fuse into a Western that pirouettes on gender farce long before the term screwball exists.