Jane Coleridge and Peter Jamison are a pair of small town sweethearts. She's an old-fashioned girl and he's timid, but he manages to get up the nerve to propose and asks her to run away with him. Unfortunately, around the time Jane's supposed to meet him at the station her father dies and she has to take care of her brothers and sisters. Jamison believes she loves someone else and disappears for several years. When he finally returns, he has a three-year-old child in tow. But he explains that his wife has been unfaithful and he and Jane renew their romance. Then wife shows up and causes trouble by claiming that Jamison left her for Jane.

A former Yale student returns to the land where his Spanish forefathers once reigned supreme and lives in the Mexican hills, occasionally riding into border towns, where he takes the law into his own hands and protects the weak from crooked elements. Known as Quemado, he prevents the marriage of a girl to a notorious desperado and meets Joanna Thatcher, an eastern girl to whom he makes the promise that she will someday come to love him. Joan becomes engaged to Gretorix, unwilling to admit to herself that she has become infatuated with the daring horseman. On Joan's wedding day, Quemado kidnaps her, forces her to admit that she loves him, and arranges to be wed by a parson on horseback as they ride furiously into the hills to avoid the pursuit of the angry Gretorix.