Janice Rule
Neddy Merrill has been away for most of the summer. He reappears at a friend’s pool. As they talk, someone notices that there are pools spanning the entire valley. He decided to jog from pool to pool to swim the whole valley. As he stops in each pool his interactions tell his life story.
When Dr. Marcus Sommers realizes that he and his troubled, estranged brother David may be prone a fatal brain disease that runs in their family, he decides to make peace with his sibling, and invites him on a trip to the Rockies. There, the brothers bond over their shared enthusiasm for cycling and decide to enter a grueling bike race through the mountains. However, Marcus’ health soon begins to fail, and David must compete without his brother at his side.
An awkward young teen working at a spa becomes overly attached to her fellow worker, a lonely outcast. They hang out at a bar owned by a strange pregnant artist and her has-been cowboy husband. Amid emotional crises, the three woman steal and trade one another’s personalities.
When Confederate soldier Matt Weaver returns to town after the Civil War, he finds that his home has been sold by town boss Sam Brewster. Brewster hires gunfighter Jules Gaspard d’Estaing to deal with Weaver, but d’Estaing’s independent approach settles the town’s problems in a very unorthodox manner.
Most everyone in town thinks that Sheriff Calder is merely a puppet of rich oil-man Val Rogers. When it is learned that local baddie Bubber Reeves has escaped prison, Rogers’ son is concerned because he is having an affair with Reeves’ wife. It seems many others in town feel they may have reasons to fear Reeves. Calder’s aim is to bring Reeves in alive, unharmed. Calder will have to oppose the powerful Rogers on one hand and mob violence on the other, in his quest for justice.
A young cowboy, whose dedication to the principles of peace and reason has earned him a reputation for cowardice, overcomes his psychological aversion to violence after his elder brother unjustly censures him for not joining in a foolhardy gunfight in which their youngest brother is killed.
Bickford Waner, an apparently naive young man from Fort Worth, arrives in the tiny Texas town of Dime Box and takes on a variety of menial jobs. He’s befriended by Reese Ford and his wife Molly, but before long Molly has seduced Bickford. Only with the arrival of Bickford’s former girlfriend Janet Conforto is it revealed that Bickford is actually the notorious train robber Kid Blue. Humiliated by a scandal arising from his affair with his friend’s wife, Bickford gives up on going straight and plots a crime.