Lightning Bill

While out West, prospector Harry Webb makes enemies of a con artist, Mark Brenton and the con's crooked lawyer, Frank Beekman. Jack goes to the city and meets singer Janice Williams in a cabaret. They become engaged, but Brenton also has designs on her. He tricks her into going to a room to meet with him, and Webb, hearing of the scheme, follows. What he finds when he gets there is Brenton on the floor, dead, and Janice holding a gun.

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.

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.

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.

Billy Milford, Harvard graduate, goes west to seek his fortune. In Addertown he secures a position as stationmaster of the L. & R. Railroad, but is forced out because of his drinking habits. He accidentally meets Gunhild, an emigrant Norwegian girl, as she arrives in Addertown to take up her home with Jan Hagsberg, the town's saloonkeeper. Seeking revenge on the railroad, Milford joins Jim Dorsey in a scheme to hold up the road's paymaster on his way to pay the employees of the company's mine.

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.

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.

Before dying, a man's friend asks him to do his best to keep the truth that he was a robber from his son.

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

One of a multitude of short Westerns directed by D.W. Griffith in the early days of film has the distinction of being the screen debut of Western star Harry Carey in a minor role.