Wunpost

The desert doesn't forgive, and it doesn't forget. When prospector John C. Calhoun, known as Wunpost, finds himself crawling through Death Valley with cracked lips and a throat like sandpaper, he knows this is probably the end. Then a hand reaches down. The rescuer is a scruffy kid named Billy, tough as sunbaked leather and handy with a gun. But Billy has a secret: under the dirt and the boyish swagger, Billy is Wilhelmina Campbell, a woman who's made herself over into something the desert will respect. Together they head toward Wunpost's dream, a gold mine tucked somewhere in that infernal landscape. But the desert has a way of bringing out both the best and worst in men, and his claim has attracted the wrong kind of attention. Dusty Rhodes and the slippery lawyer Judson Eells are circling, hungry and treacherous. Coolidge writes the frontier as it actually was: brutal, indifferent, and absolutely unforgiving. This is Western fiction with grit in its teeth and sand in its lungs.