October,

1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky

Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and

debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers.

 Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker, but also a

doper, a drinker and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is

heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride

of the devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.

A thunderbolt

love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west

on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho.

Briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of

deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and

closing in fast . . .