The premise is about a drifter named Fallon who is about to be hung after a card game, a man with no direction in life who is sick of living from moment-to-moment. He escapes and comes upon a family that needs help in the middle of a desert wasteland. So Fallon gets the idea to lead them to a nearby abandoned mining town, and rebuild the town with them.
The town is a wreck. It was abandoned 10 years prior and sits on the edge of some water by the mountains. All the stores and other buildings were left intact with a lot of supplies still inside. The people had left in a hurry after learning the mines were "salted," meaning someone had placed fake gold inside to make them seem like gold mines. Once word got out, everyone just skipped town as quickly as possible with as little as possible, since it was difficult to haul across the desert.
It's a simple premise and a highly effective premise since it speaks to that moment in life when the wanderer finds a way.
Without going too much into detail, my own take is this:
There are potentials all around us. Whether they're blank pages, the wrecks of relationships and unfinished projects, broken down cars, busted up houses, untended yards, unhealthy bodies. You name it.
And a lot of them will just sit that way until someone has a desperate moment and sees in a flash all the work that is necessary to fix/build that thing up. That person sees themselves rebuilding it, sees their future self in a better place for having done so, and feels like the work is a gift rather than a curse.
There's a line in the book where Fallon remembers an old saying:
"If a man ever finds himself loving hard work, he's as good as dead." And Fallon changes his mind about it. "Fun" for him (card games, gambling, women, running from place to place) has stopped being fun.
Using his accumulated life skills (farming, foraging, carpentry, construction, charm) suddenly becomes a gift in this situation.
I know this is typical of L'Amour's works but it really stands out here. Fallon works from sunup to sundown, deals with the new people coming to town to set up shop, drains the ink from plants to make new signs, cleans out of the buildings, convinces people of different trades to move in, builds a dam for irrigation, hunts and brings back food, and on and on and on.
