Cactus and Rattlers

The desert has a way of collecting the broken and the strange. In Stovepipe Springs, where the heat shimmers off adobe walls and a man can go days without seeing another soul, Sagebrush Beam has made peace with his solitude. He's built a life among the saguaros and the silence, content to let the world forget him. Then Professor Percival Henry J. Tompkins arrives, polished, pompous, and wholly unprepared for what the desert has to offer. What begins as comic mismatch, a city scientist chasing specimens through hostile territory, deepens into something neither man expected. Bedford-Jones writes the American Southwest with the same affection a poet gives to a difficult beloved: its dangers are real, its inhabitants are mad, and its beauty will kill you if you let it. This is adventure fiction at its leanest and most honest, a story about what happens when two men who have chosen isolation find they might choose each other instead.