A young doctor falls in love with a disturbed young woman and apparently becomes involved in the death of her husband. They head for Mexico trying to outrun the law.

In 1867, a gang robs a bank and flees into the desert. Out of water, the outlaws encounter a ghost town called Yellow Sky and its only residents, a hostile young woman and her grandfather.

A big-city cop is reassigned to the country after his superiors find him too angry to be an effective policeman. While on his temporary assignment he assists in a manhunt of a suspected murderer.

Two young horse traders guide a Mormon wagon train to the San Juan Valley and encounter rugged terrain, the cutthroat Clegg gang, hospitable Navajo, and moral challenges on the journey.

Sam Tucker, a cotton picker, in search of a better future for his family, decides to grow his own cotton crop. In the first year, the Tuckers battle disease, a flood, and a jealous neighbor. Can they make it as farmers?

Cashier and part-time starving artist Christopher Cross is absolutely smitten with the beautiful Kitty March. Kitty plays along, but she's really only interested in Johnny, a two-bit crook. When Kitty and Johnny find out that art dealers are interested in Chris's work, they con him into letting Kitty take credit for the paintings. Cross allows it because he is in love with Kitty, but his love will only let her get away with so much.

An Australian nurse discovers an effective new treatment for infantile paralysis, but experiences great difficulty in convincing doctors of the validity of her claims.

Rural Mississippi in the 1940s: Lucas Beauchamp, a local black man with a reputation of not kowtowing to whites, is found standing over the body of a dead white man, holding a pistol that has recently been fired. Quickly arrested for murder and jailed, Beauchamp insists he's innocent and asks the town's most prominent lawyer, Gavin Stevens, to defend him, but Stevens refuses. When a local boy whom Beauchamp has helped in the past and who believes him to be innocent hears talk of a mob taking Beauchamp out of jail and lynching him, he pleads with Stevens to defend Beauchamp at trial and prove his innocence.

In the late 1800s, Miss Pilgrim, a young stenographer, or typewriter, becomes the first female employee at a Boston shipping office. Although the men object to her at first, she soon charms them all, especially the handsome young head of the company. Their romance gets sidetracked when she becomes involved in the Women's Suffrage movement.

An orphaned man recalls his upbringing with his aunt and her husband, the parson, in a small Western town during the Reconstruction.