The Flaming Forties

When he thinks his brother has let him down, a cowboy goes bad.

A town—where everyone seems to be named Johnson—stands in the way of the railroad. In order to grab their land, robber baron Hedley Lamarr sends his henchmen to make life in the town unbearable. After the sheriff is killed, the town demands a new sheriff from the Governor, so Hedley convinces him to send the town the first black sheriff in the west.

A reformed outlaw give up the girl because of his past.

John Gregg and his daughter Mary, on their way to Burro Springs, a boom mining town, lose their way and stumble into "Jawbone," a dilapidated town. Here they meet Mike Hernandez, a good-looking bad man. Mary, thinking Mike a gentleman, takes a liking to him. "Cheyenne" Harry, a homely looking good man, comes to Jawbone and Mary believes him to be a weak character. He becomes fascinated with her. Gregg hires Mike Hernandez to guide him to Burro Springs, displaying his small store of gold when paying Hernandez. Later, Gregg and his party become lost in the desert, and run out of water.

With a price upon his head. Texas Pete takes to the open country.

The hero's mother is desperately ill and the young fellow, while going afoot for a doctor, stops a mail carrier and forces him- at the point of the pistol- to give up his horse.

Hell Bent Wade is the victim of an attack in which is wife is killed and daughter kidnapped. A couple of decades later, he is a sheriff known only as the "mysterious rider," because of his nighttime prowls in search of cattle rustlers.

Dismissed from the church because of his seemingly undue intimacy with the schoolteacher, the young minister becomes an evangelist and, after an incident in which he thrashes the drunken sheriff, is appointed sheriff by the mayor. In the girl's home he sees a picture of her father, whom he recognizes as identical with that on a circular calling for the arrest of Idaho Mac, a notorious desperado. He promises the girl that he will never use his gun against her father, but sends his deputy, the ex-sheriff, to apprehend Idaho Mac at the border. The bandit, badly wounded by the deputy's bullets, reaches his daughter's house, and she thinks the sheriff false to his word.

Out of the talk at the Sportsmen's Club arises a wager between the globe-trotter and his friend, who bets that he will not be able, within a fixed time, to find his way out of an isolated mountain location to which he will lead him.

Two road agents hold up the stagecoach and rob the passengers. In making their getaway, one of the road agents is shot by the stage driver. They stop at a lonely cabin, where a miner's widow lives with her little daughter, and ask for aid.

The new foreman falls in love with the ranchman's daughter, and notes with jealousy her joy over a letter which her father receives.