What happens when a Korean War vet recovering from serious injuries wins a ghost town in a contest, meets a hard-riding, gun-toting cowgirl, and is threatened by three dangerous people all within a few days? Answer: cock-eyed characters, pixilated dialogue, zany romance, and heart-stopping suspense. In short, everything Kelland fans love about his novels. Based in part on real events–and set in a real ghost town that was actually given away (by The Saturday Evening Post) in a real contest, a place you can still visit today.

Waldo Emerson Whitelaw was pleasantly surprised when he won a supposedly worthless Arizona ghost town named Sidewinder Gulch in a "write a jingle" contest. He was less pleasantly surprised when the glowering Hugo Pung offered him $6,000 for the deed–and threatened his life if he refused. Was Sidewinder Gulch somehow more valuable than Whitelaw believed? So, he took laconic, plain-spoken New Englanders Habakkuk Ware and his wife, Melinna, who had raised him after his parents' deaths, and set off for Arizona. When they arrived, he met the rear end of a cow backing toward him in a clear state of hysteria, with ranch woman Gwendolin Carver attached to a rope at its head. "You underfed, skinny-legged dude," she said to Whitelaw. "Grab hold of this rope and help!" Everything he said and did after that only seemed to irritate her more. That night, self-styled land speculator Miles Winter and his seductive gal-friend, Mona Avery, showed up and made him an even bigger offer for the deed to Sidewinder Gulch. A few hours later a shot rang out.

Thus begins one of Clarence Budington Kelland's finest and rarest novels, previously only published as a seven-part serial in the legendary and best-selling magazine of its era, The Saturday Evening Post.