This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. In the dusty frontier settlement of Piperock, where bad luck, payrolls, and bullion pass through with equal regularity, narrator Ike Harper watches the town's comic tempers flare around every new arrival. First comes a ragged sheepman named Fate, a wild-eyed drifter who claims he is hunting both his mate and revenge; then follows Redfield Mulford, a boastful showman fronting a traveling attraction that includes the sinister magician Oscuro, a European musician, and a Native medicine man hawking a miracle cure called Marvelous Myopic. Piperock's hard-bitten citizens greet them with suspicion, sarcasm, and laughter, especially when the slick promoter's handbills and grand claims collide with frontier common sense. But the show is no harmless diversion. When Oscuro stages a "mind over matter" demonstration, the evening becomes a comic duel of nerves, tricks, and near violence, ending with Fate bound for a final test that may be magic, bluff, or something far more dangerous. As broncs buck, fists fly, and a robbery plot unravels, Dirty Shirt Jones and the others expose a gang of thieves by discovering that the supposed gold sacks are only flat-irons and that the real mastermind is outlaw Mexican Allard. Full of sharp wit, mistaken identities, and escalating frontier chaos, this is a tale of fate, folly, and the men foolish enough to trust either.
