Wounded Civil War soldier John Dunbar tries to commit suicide—and becomes a hero instead. As a reward, he's assigned to his dream post, a remote junction on the Western frontier, and soon makes unlikely friends with the local Sioux tribe.
William Munny is a retired, once-ruthless killer turned gentle widower and hog farmer. To help support his two motherless children, he accepts one last bounty-hunter mission to find the men who brutalized a prostitute.
Drifters Tom Williams and Joe Morgan have a chance meeting with the sheriff's daughter and learn that her brother Jim is being held prisoner in Line Hollow by Wolf, who aspires to be the next sheriff.
When the Great Chief's body is placed before the funeral pile by his mourning braves, his sacred blanket is covered over it and a sentinel left to watch that this, his last resting place, is not desecrated.
For Nita Valyez, who is half-Spanish and half-Irish, Carlos represents potential violence and danger, two things to which she is both attracted and repelled.
Miner Dan Stuyvesant finally strikes it rich, but on his way to report his claim, he is shot. When Jack Dedlow, the head of a gang of outlaws, hears this news, he rides to Stuyvesant's cabin intending to secure the claim for himself.
Ranchmen try to play a joke on one of their associates by signing his name to a letter addressed to Sarah Smith, who has advertised in a matrimonial journal.
Poor abbé Contantin, he is devastated at the news: to think that two American ladies have bought the local manor where he has always been welcome! Worse, Mrs.
Their only sim was that they loved too much: lovers never stop to count the cost. He was a young millionaire and she was only a "Bargain "Basement" girl, but they had one week of paradise that started two years of drama.
A twenty-year veteran of the printing room of The San Francisco Chronicle is passed up for a promotion at the same time his son is accused of graft and involved in scandal.
Tom loves Patsy, but she lives in the city while he is every bit the country bumpkin. When an invention of his sells, he decides to take the money and go to the city.
American sculptress Adele La Rue, working in Paris, lacks the inspiration to create a masterpiece, until Jean Ballard, a wild apache leader, takes refuge from the police in her apartment.
After being educated in England, Daisy Forbes returns to China, the country of her birth, and discovers that her father has recently died and that she has become a social outcast, owing to the public revelation that the oriental nurse who raised her was actually her mother.
Jane Brower wants nothing more than to leave behind her ranch life in the West and go East. When she happens upon a party in the private railroad car of wealthy August Van Dorn, Jane gets the idea to finance her trip by kidnapping his son, Donald, for ransom.