It's been one year since Chicago pump jockey Joe Wilson and schoolteacher Katherine Grant have seen each other, when Katherine moved to Capitol City for a better paying job so that they jointly could earn enough money quicker to be able to get married. Joe is now driving to Capitol City in he feeling they have enough money for that permanent reunion. En route in the small town of Strand, Joe is stopped by the local sheriff in they having circumstantial evidence that he may be involved in a kidnapping. Word spreads quickly throughout the town that "a perpetrator" in the kidnapping has been apprehended and is being held in the local jail. Wanting their form of justice faster than what the sheriff's department is able to do, many of the townsfolk decide to take matters into their own hands and storm the jail, ultimately burning it down, the fire started just as Katherine, hearing about Joe's incarceration, arrives on the scene to see Joe in the cell window of the burning building, she witnessing Joe's death which places her in a semi-comatose state in emotional shock. Two subsequent items emerge which change the nature of the matter. First, the true kidnappers are apprehended in another town, they who confess to the crime. As such under the law, those in Strand that stormed the jail and burned down the building could be charged with Joe's murder. And second, Joe, aware of the law, reveals himself to be alive only to his two brothers, Charlie and Tom Wilson, back in Chicago, Joe who was able to escape from the burning building. With Charlie and Tom's help, Joe wants his own form of vigilante justice to see that those who "killed" him are charged and convicted with his murder which he doesn't believe will happen in the townsfolk protecting their own regardless of what they know to be the truth. In the process of the subsequent trial, Katherine has evidence that Joe is actually alive. She herself has to decide what to do, especially in believing that Joe's own vigilantism is not the man she knows and is not a foundation for a life together with him if that's what he still has in mind.—Huggo