The Outrage

During the post Civil War era in the desert town of Silver Gulch, the town's preacher, a prospector and a con man meet somewhat by chance in the town's isolated and generally deserted train station. While the preacher and the con man wait for the train which does not usually stop here, the preacher and the prospector tell the con man the story of the murder trial with which they were just involved, a notorious womanizing Mexican bandit named Juan Carrasco who was charged with the murder of Colonel Wakefield of Tennessee as he and his wife were traveling through the area. The prospector and the preacher were subpoenaed to testify as the person who found Wakefield's stabbed dead body in the woods and the person who saw the happy couple on the road earlier in the day, respectively. What came out in the trial was the reason the preacher is leaving town for good, that testimony which he could not reconcile with his moral beliefs. Beyond the preacher and the prospector's testimony, the court heard the conflicting accounts of the three people who should know what happened as the three people on the scene at the time: the accused Juan Carrasco, Mrs. Wakefield, and through spiritual means Colonel Wakefield himself. Although there are similarities in their three stories including Carrasco gagging and tying the Colonel up to a tree in the process of robbing him, and Carrasco sexually violating Mrs. Wakefield, there are marked differences in the rest of the stories including who actually killed the Colonel. The question then became and still becomes which of any of the three accounts is the accurate one, or if there is another completely different reality to what happened.