Jane and her husband Bill "Ham" Hammond live in an isolated house with their five-year-old daughter Katie. One day, Ham returns home with several serious bullet wounds. As Jane is tending to his injuries, Ham tells her that the Bishop Boys, a group of criminals that Ham used to ride with, are coming for him. Ham's injuries have rendered him helpless, so Jane takes her daughter to safety with a woman that she trusts. She then rides to the home of a neighbour and former fiancé, Dan Frost, and asks him to help her protect her family from the Bishop Boys. Dan, a surly man living in a squalid house, bitterly refuses. Jane rides into town to buy guns and ammunition and find help. As she is leaving the shop, she is waylaid and dragged into an alley by one of the Bishop gang who threatens her at gunpoint. Jane claims that she has not seen Hammond in years, but the man recognizes the gun she is carrying as Ham's and demands that she take him back to her house. However, Dan Frost suddenly appears and tells the thug to leave Jane alone. Jane draws her gun and kills the outlaw. Leaving the body in the alley, Jane and Dan ride back to her house. Ham is still alive, but very weak. Dan has changed his mind about helping Jane, so they start preparing for the expected attack from the Bishop gang. Bishop sets out with his gang to find Ham. One of his men chances upon Jane's house and recognizes Jane, but Dan kills and buries him before he can raise an alarm. Dan digs a shallow trench in Jane's front yard, and they fill it with jars containing kerosene, nails and pieces of glass. Flashbacks show that Jane and Dan were once engaged, but he enlisted in the army to fight in the
American Civil War. Captured by the enemy, he was
held for years in a prison camp, but when he finally returned home, Jane had left. He travelled from state to state trying to find her, showing her photograph in every town. Eventually, he heard that she had
moved west on a
wagon-train led by John Bishop. Dan talked to Bishop, who told him that, during the journey, Ham and Jane ran off together. He said that he would gladly help Dan to track them down, as he had his own scores to settle with Ham, but Dan refused, saying that he preferred to ride alone. Dan eventually found Jane, but by then, she was married to Ham and they had had a child. Heartbroken, Dan realized that he had lost her forever. Later, Jane tells Dan her side of the story. After Dan left to enlist, she discovered that she was pregnant. When Dan did not return or write, she assumed that he was dead, and life in Jane's war-torn town had become so wretched that she decided to take her daughter Mary and move West on the Bishop wagon train. Too late, she and the other women on the wagon-train realized that Bishop intended to start a brothel, forcing the helpless women into prostitution. Ham, having taken a fancy to Jane during the wagon-train journey, told Bishop that he wanted to marry her. But Bishop told Ham that Jane was his "property". Later, Ham found that Jane and her daughter had gone missing; searching for Mary, he saw a child's boot in the river and assumed that the child has drowned. He went to the brothel where Jane had been forced to work, killed some of Bishop's men, rescued her, and told her that Mary was dead. Back in the present, the Bishop gang finally arrive at Jane's house under cover of darkness and riddle the house with bullets. Dan and Jane fire into the booby-trapped ditch, igniting the
kerosene "bombs". Most of the gang are killed, but some – including Bishop himself – escape. Jane and Dan manage to move the dying Ham into a shallow storage space beneath the floor, to protect him from the gunfire, but the strain is too much for him and he dies. Dan and Jane continue to fight it out with the remaining gang members, although both are wounded. Finally, Bishop (the only gang member left alive) manages to corner Dan and is about to kill him, when Jane sneaks up behind Bishop and draws her gun on him. Trying to persuade her not to kill him, Bishop tells Jane that Mary is not dead, as she had thought. Jane shoots him several times, wounding him badly, until, in his agony, he reveals that Mary is at the brothel. Jane then kills Bishop. Jane and Dan go to the brothel and find their daughter, Mary, who is working as a servant. Jane takes the bodies of Bishop and his gang to the sheriff and collects a huge reward. Then she, Dan, Mary and Katie ride off together to start a new life as a family. == Cast ==