As the drovers prepare to celebrate Rowdy's birthday, two men ride into camp. Rowdy recognizes them as men he spent time with in the Yuma POW camp. He knows they want to settle an old score but is willing to go alone with them. They ride to a setting that is as forbidding as the overcrowded, disease-ridden Yuma camp they survived - the wrecked courthouse of a trailside ghost town. For 6 years, ex-CSA Captain Cabot and his devoted followers searched for prison mate Rowdy, who's anxious to put the U.S. Civil War behind him. They find an old alcoholic living there who had been a judge. Cabot tells the judge he has a trial to preside over. After two more men arrives one of whom is paralyzed, they have a kangaroo-court trial of Rowdy for treason. They believe he betrayed their escape attempts.
—David Stevens