PLUMB DRILLIN'

The author is a script writer by trade, and this is as sparsely fleshed out a fictional treatment as the bony gelding Luke Adam DeCaire rides into his old town after three years in the hoosegow on a trumped-up charge of rustling. DeCaire, whose ""character could be deciphered in the runes of scar and seam,"" is edged into the job of bringing weak Jonathan Turner, viciously blinded by Indians, and his blonde wife Jane, into the desert where Jonathan claimed he had found gold. There too, is gun-happy Turk, who had once raped Jane, and who protects his half-wit brother tagging along. It all finally melts down to a battle of cool in the red hot sun between DeCaire and the white-hating Indian, Terremoto--two strong men meeting faze to faze. The men talk good and true, but Jane suffers the fate of most females in the oaters: ""All my emotional capacity was preoccupied with anguish,"" she explains at one point. No wonder a real man prefers his hoss. A scenario awaiting the assured filming.