While stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop, a traveling salesman is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.

Years after the Civil War, a bounty hunter and his captive are waylaid by a Wyoming blizzard and hole up in a way station with six dicey strangers.

Oscar Diggs, a small-time circus illusionist and con-artist, is whisked from Kansas to the Land of Oz where the inhabitants assume he's the great wizard of prophecy, there to save Oz from the clutches of evil.