Tom Patterson, a young puncher, becomes engaged to Ethel Hastings, a pretty Western girl, just preceding Patterson's departure with the other punchers for the big fall round-up. A few weeks later, Ethel meets Jack Ferguson, a strolling gambler, whose apparently ardent and sincere love soon turns the girl's head. Following her promise to marry Ferguson, Ethel visits Tom at the round-up, and gives him back his ring. Heartbroken, Tom releases her and leaves the ranch. Only a few weeks elapse when the girl realizes her terrible mistake in marrying the gambler. She is ill when Jack tells her he has decided to leave her. Despite her pleas for him to remain he goes away. Some time later, Ethel locates her husband, and going to him, begs him to take her back, but he thrusts her out of the house and the heart-broken girl, stumbling away, drops in the grass, where she is found in a dying condition by Tom Patterson. He soon learns the truth, and after the girl dies he seeks out Ferguson, and at the point of a gun makes him come to his shack and view the frail body of his former wife. Patterson then gives Ferguson the choice of a vial of poison or a bullet from his Colt, and the latter, seeing that escape from death at the hands of the enraged man would be fruitless, swallows the poison.