Out of the East came a young man, cleanly fashioned and nobly made, answering the call of the desert's waste, that pioneers have responded to from time immemorial. On the desert's rim, the moral youth, whom we had known as such, tastes of the bitter fruit of the cactus, a plant of death, and as the poison gurgles madly through his veins, he meets with Chiquita, a Spanish dancer, and the quiet, sane youth is turned by this foreign incense into a mad animal, bent on lust. The girl of his boyhood dreams comes into the West after her mother's death to wed him, and finds the wreck of a man, the shell of the youth she had known and loved.
—Moving Picture World synopsis