Clay Burgess (Tom Mix), a drifter, returns to the small town of Palo to find the president of the bank -- his father -- murdered and the unscrupulous "Big" Dave Dawley (George Nichols) in charge.
The story begins as Tom Mills (Tom Mix) rides off to fight in WWI. Leaving his ranch in the care of his sister Ellen (Carmelita Geraghty) and her husband Ed (Carl Miller) Mills returns from the battlefield two years later to find that his brother-in-law has deserted, and the ranch is in a state of ruin and disrepair.
While in Europe, Chaddie Green, a society girl, discovers that she has been left penniless. She returns to the United States and meets Duncan MacKail, who is equally broke though he owns grainland in the West.
Tom Mix plays Tim, a goodhearted cowpuncher who, while riding down a trail, gets robbed of the money he was carrying for the Belgian Babies' Milk Fund.
Pinto Peters and his pal Chuckwalla Bill ride into town just as the editor of the local newspaper is being urged to leave by a gang of thugs led by Joe Reedly.
When respectable Lloyd Norwood becomes infatuated with moll Goldie Lewis, he falls into a life of debasement, which results in his being accused of the murder of gangland henchman Joe the Swell.
Wealthy cripple Markley finances the education of blacksmith's daughter Ruth. When she returns to their small town he asks to marry her, but she runs off with city worker Jim Dirk who is then killed in a subway accident.
When a circus troupe comes to a small, extremely conservative New England town, the residents go to their minister to have him protest the scandalous fact that the female tightrope walker wears a pair of pink tights.
An Eastern boy is sent to the West to run the family's sheep ranch. The presence of sheep anger nearby cattlemen, who don't want to share their cattle's grazing lands with them, and their leader has no compunctions about resorting to drastic measures to protect his interests.
In the film, Breamer’s character, Miriam Holt (“the girl who sees around corners”), proves her psychic powers by locating children who went missing during the war.
Mrs. John Cleveland, victim of an overly-jealous husband, adopts a child but, fearing to bring it into her own household, furnishes another home for it, and places the little girl in charge of a nurse.
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Have you watched The Flame of Hellgate yet? What did you think about it?