Overview

This tragic and comic play is a Western love-duel between a mountain woman and a gun slinger in a mining town in the USA, 1865. A brawling, feisty card-deck of knaves and jokers are drawn to the treasure mountains' quick and fabulous wealth; a money-making madam with a heart like a decimal point; the Porter Sisters whose answer to any problem from snake bite to salvation is the bible; Little Britches, a pint-sized saloon girl; Hoss and John, silver miners living on lard sandwiches and dreams. When Marie-Claire arrives in Daggert for a showdown with the father of her child and the man who cheated her, the combat circle is drawn in the sawdust of the dance floor. Their love-duel draws Jude, the young poetic drifter, and Elizabeth Penny-packer, the town's prim schoolteacher, into the bead of fire.