Chapter 1

Blackjack clung like a beachside fishing village to the ash gray desert that sprawled as far as the eye could see toward the craggy-hewn peaks of the Kingston Range, a motley collection of sun-parched ridges in the southern end of the California Sierras. To the north lay the natural furnace of Death Valley; less than a hundred miles beyond the mountains, Las Vegas nestled like a multicolored jewel in the parched wilderness of the Mojave. It was almost mid-day, and today, like every other day of the year, most activity had ground tediously to a standstill so that men and machines could be replenished. A dozen or so of the men huddled under the tin roof of the open-ended maintenance shed, talking quietly so as not to exert themselves in the scorching heat, waiting for the signal to shuffle back over the powdery wastes and return to their jobs on the oil derricks. Blackjack had a long, if not glorious, history as a mining town. First as a base camp for fruitless gold hunts in the killer mountains, later as a home for borax miners, and now, though mostly in ruin except for a few unpainted cabins that were still inhabitable, as the temporary hometown for nearly twenty "roughnecks" and whatever families they possessed. Blackjack had been invaded seven months ago by Benny Terrell and his ragged crew of fortune hunters, in search of an elusive reservoir of crude oil that might or might not exist, in hopes of a fortune that might or might not fall into their hands. And all of them, including Jamie Olsen, working for wages that seemed as elusive as this tricky oil field they were searching for.

Sarah Olsen, Jamie's twenty year old wife of three months, sat alone and sullen on the shaky front porch of their tiny two room shack, her rocking chair carefully positioned so that the runners did not cause any weight to be placed upon the dozen or so completely rotted planks in the porch's unpainted floor. She rocked slowly and gently in the midday heat so as not to use up too much precious strength -- there was still dinner to cook, if you could call boiled potatoes and pork belly a dinner, and dishes to wash... and Jamie's one decent work-shirt to be hand scrubbed and hung on the line stretched across the porch to dry in less than a half hour in the desert's hot waterless breeze. Sometimes she felt that the desert's furnace-hot wind was drying her out much the same way, draining her whole young body of its very youthfulness just as it sucked the moisture from a dripping-wet shirt in twenty minutes or so.

Scanning the black on white type of the newspaper old Mr. Parker brought her from his supply run into the city, Sarah brushed her blonde hair from her eyes and wiped her forehead instinctively. "Instinctively" because out here in the desert there was really no need for that; perspiration evaporated as fast as it beaded up on your skin in this zero humidity heat. All morning long she had carefully gone down the long, finely-printed columns, x-ing them off one by one, narrowing her hopes for any escape from this perpetual furnace she was trapped in as surely as a sinner is trapped in purgatory. One by one, each tiny inked-in "X" snuffing a little more of the flicker of hope that ached in her breast, Sarah Marie Olsen had eliminated her methods of escape and her chances for another life outside this hell hole that only a money-maddened wildcatter with a cooked brain could call a town.