When Kirsten South’s once-wealthy father suddenly passed away, she found he had gone broke, leaving her nothing but a profitless ranch.

Fresh from an East-Coast finishing school, Kirsten set herself a task of fantastic difficulty - managing, quite without experience, a ranch in Arizona. It was the only asset she had left. That, and her hunger for independence, impelled her to make a go of it. Finding that her manager had let the ranch slide, Kirsten discharged him leaving a staff of her maid, a cook, four cowboys and a new arrival: a dirty, ragged, bearded derelict cowpoke named Sundown.

The endless work and monotony was broken by the call of Sam Boston, a real estate broker who glibly told Kirsten he had brought a buyer for the ranch. Kirsten told him in no uncertain terms that she would not sell - but as they were leaving, she heard them grimly declare that they would “have to put on the pressure”.

One night the hay was deliberately burned, and the next morning three of her five hands quit, leaving only Ramon and the taciturn Sundown to lighten Kirsten’s otherwise impossible workload. Ramon informed her that a stranger had offered all of them money to quit their jobs. Only he and Sundown had refused.

Kirsten set out for Phoenix at once to hire more ranch hands and see her banker. Losing her way among her vast acreage, Kirsten stumbled on a group of men rustling her cattle. Creeping nearer to see who the men were, Kirsten had no idea that she was about to be plunged into the most terrifying experience of her life. Nor did Sundown, riding the fence to check for breaks where the cattle might slip through, realize that his façade as a man who needed no one and nothing was about to be cracked. Or that he would soon be called on to exercise his legendary skill with a six-shooter - a skill he had come to despise - when he and Kirsten waged the strangest showdown the west had ever seen.