When his Ranger father is shot down and seriously wounded by rustlers, young Bob Baxter is given a Ranger's badge and a delivery to town of the rustlers who were captured by the sheriff's posse. Bob boards a stage and meets his boyhood friend, Mary Clayton, who is returning to the ranch owned by her brother, Danny, and herself near Cheeko. Bob fails to notice Nat the Bat, wanted for murder, who slinks back in his seat when he sees Bob's Ranger badge. Arriving in Cheeko, Bob sees that he and the Sheriff will be unable to hold the prisoners against a lynch mob, so he releases them and plans on picking them up again later. One of them is Danny Clayton, who had unwittingly gotten mixed up with Bert, leader of the rustling gang, and had unknowingly been engaged in running off his own cattle in the darkness, thinking they belonged to Bert.(Danny is not the brightest bloom on the sage.) Bob trails the gang to the Clayton ranch and is winged by Bert as he attempts to make a capture.