The adventures of a young, upper-class New Yorker who gets into trouble in the Civil War draft riots and flees west. On the frontier he meets gamblers, Indians, outlaws and mountain men, and has run-ins which such famous characters as General Custer and Wild Bill Hickok. Twenty years later he returns, only to take off again, this time to write cowboy songs for the movie industry in Hollywood. Narrated as an old man.

In the spring of 1896, after thirty years spent dispensing justice in Montana, Judge Harlan Blackthorne expires, leaving Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, his most steadfast officer, to escort his remains across the continent by rail. The long journey is interrupted from time to time by station stops for the public to pay its respects, and for various marching bands to serenade the departed with his favorite ballad, "After the Ball." This gives Murdock...