Challengers of the dust

the long version

George Earle returns from college to his Oklahoma birthplace and finds it drastically altered. The Dust Bowl and the Depression have transformed the bucolic farmtown into a desolate wasteland where few are healthy, happy, or employed. A chance encounter with Pretty Boy Floyd lands him in jail with a melancholy pulp-literary agent named Hart. They're given one chance to avoid execution by accepting an unlikely task: find local powerbroker Doc Bennett's wayward daughter. They head east and meet migrants, vagabonds, rail-riders, rainmakers, a few destined to become famous, a few too dangerous to live, and the most ghoulish acts of a starved population, while attempting to fulfill their impossible mission.