Luz is in jail, accused of murdering her own children. Her husband and her mother-in-law say she killed them in cold blood. Dr. Rebollar tries to help the woman, but she refuses to remember anything. Luz thinks of jail as the purgatory: it's only one step to reach the Heaven.

Sam Longwood, a frontiersman who has seen better days, spies the gold-mine partner, Jack Colby, who ran off with all the gold from a mine they were prospecting fifteen years earlier. He tells his other partners from that time, Joe Knox and Billy, and they confront Colby demanding not only the thousand dollars he took but an addition fifty-nine thousand for their trouble. After being thwarted in this attempt, they, and a would-be named Thursday, hatch a plan to kidnap Colby's wife, Nancy Sue, who is coincidently Sam's old flame, but find that Nancy Sue is not the sweet girl that Sam remembers.