The Wolverine

Sun-bleached sagebrush trembles beneath a sky the color of tarnished pewter when taciturn cattleman Jack Connolly—his silhouette as jagged as the distant Sawtooth spurs—rides into a one-street settlement where rumor spreads faster than a prairie fire. A young wrangler, Ivor McFadden, stands manacled, accused of rebranding beeves beneath a blood-red moon; the town’s paterfamilias, Leo D. Maloney, demands rope justice before dusk. Connolly, whose eyes carry the weight of winter carcasses, bribes the blacksmith for five minutes in the jail’s choking dust, listens to the kid’s fractured alibi, and then embarks on a laconic crusade to exhume the truth. He digs spent shells from a gulch, matches them to a hidden Winchester in the banker’s office, and uncovers promissory notes forged by the very magnate who profits from foreclosure auctions. Along the way, Anne Schaefer—radiant with prairie grit—guides him through basalt canyons where echoes mimic cougars, while Helen Gibson’s itinerant photographer freezes silver-plate evidence of clandestine night herds. The final reckoning unfolds in a corral lashed by sheet lightning: Connolly, wounded in the thigh, faces Maloney beneath a swinging lantern; the confrontation ends not with a hail of bullets but with a single, deliberate shot that severs the rope intended for McFadden, sending the tyrant sprawling into hoof-churned muck. Dawn finds the rancher burning the mortgage papers, smoke curling like a ghost that finally knows its name.