An American adventurer, Captain Jack Forest, rides across the Chihuahuan desert into Santa Fé for the Feast of the Corn, and meets Chiquita, the dancer the whole town is talking about — daughter of a Tewana war chief, brought up by the mission padre. Around them move a scheming grandee with a secret marriage behind him, Forest's own disapproving family off the tourist stage, and a lost Spanish mine called the Esmeralda. Ritter Brown wrote it as a romance of the desert Southwest, and it ends not in a drawing-room but before ten thousand Tewana riders.