In the summer of 1923 Grant Collins leaves his languishing career as a journalist and travels to Montana to interview Tornado Tom, the last living rider of the Pony Express. Tom invites Grant to stay at his Buffalo Rock Ranch, a sprawling enterprise which Tom has hewn from the Montana wilderness. As the summer unfolds, Tom tells Grant of his seventy year odyssey from a Spartan childhood among the Blackfeet Indians to his life of baronial comfort. At The Buffalo Rock, Grant experiences the mise-en-scene of Tom's life, as he reluctantly learns to ride, shoot and fight. It is love at first sight when Grant meets Dixie, Tom's great-niece who is also visiting from Saint Louis. Among stolen moments of romance, Grant chronicles the life and times of the erstwhile frontiersman. When Buck Horton, a ranch hand with a penchant for violence, disputes Grant's claim to the heart of Dixie, the young lovers soon find themselves galloping headlong on the hooves of hell into the jaws of a deadly triangle.