Eliza Montgomery is a good Christian woman living in Providence, Utah in the 1870s. She is under the thumb of her religious zealot father, who constantly belittles her and admonishes her to be a woman of virtue and chastity. Coming out of church one day, she sees a drifter riding into town. Something in her stirs when he tips his hat to her, but she refuses to admit the attraction. After several chance encounters with him, he is hired by her father to work on the family farm. Things soon begin to heat up when her father falls ill, and she falls under the drifter's thrall. A rancher's son whom she has been betrothed to by her father has other thoughts about this relationship, and determines to rid the world of the drifter.