Mary Ainslie has been waiting 30 years for her fiancé, a sea captain, to return. She has kept a light burning in her window to guide him home. His son Carl, by another woman, arrives on vacation in the New England village where Mary lives. Mary is overcome by the resemblance between the young man and his father. The young man falls in love with Ruth, Mary's young comrade. On her deathbed, Mary wishes Carl and Ruth the romantic life that she did not live.

Brave and good-natured cowboy Sandy Burke saves young Dolly after her father is killed in the saloon. He entrusts the girl to kindly Widow Mackey, who is having trouble paying her mortgage and decides he is responsible for the pair so he best start earning some money. Soon he is seeking work at the U-Bar-U ranch but who could predict the trouble he will have with the rancher's daughter, Molly, or the surly foreman, Jim Diggs!

"Damaged Goods" pictures the terrible consequences of vice and the physical ruin that follows the abuse of moral law. It is a stirring plea for a pure life before marriage, in order to make impossible the transmission of hereditary traits to future generations.

After his assistant, Bud Lester, is killed, Texas Ranger Speedy Meade bids farewell to his girl friend, convent student Mary Dillman, and sets out to break up a gang of cattle thieves operating on the border.

The Earl of Dunhaven, who disinherited his son for marrying an American, tries, on his deathbed, to leave his estate to his nephew, the Honorable Guy Wyndham. To stop him, the Dunhaven solicitor, John Grahame, travels to America and finds the earl's grandson, Jim Dunn, a Wyoming cowpuncher.

U.S. Marshal "High Pockets" Henderson discovers the body of Bud Blythe near the town of Farewell. After leaving his fingerprints on a photograph of Blythe's sister Joy, who traveled West with Blythe to start a ranch, High Pockets informs the sheriff.

Al Boyd, a wealthy cattle rancher, falls in love with Betty Swiftmore, the sophisticated daughter of an Eastern meat packing tycoon. However, Betty loves fellow socialite Harrison Stevens and dismisses Al's marriage proposal, until a lawsuit threatens to bankrupt her family.

A young girl inherits half of the Lost Camp Mine when her father dies. His partner tries to help her from being cheated out of her share of the mine, first by local crooks and then by a group of her greedy relatives back East.

To escape the dreary formality of her born life, Drucilla marries a missionary, Ferdinand Smith, and goes with him to Africa. Here her life proves anything but happy. Denied the pleasures enjoyed by most girls of her age, she endures her husband's cold severity as long as possible and then leaves him, returning to America, where she visits her old school friend, Letitia Proudfoot. It is while attending a reception with Letitia that she meets the poet, Forrest Smith, whose attentions are welcome after the austerity of the frigid Ferdinand.