The story begins in a saloon, with Luke McVane, a “Range Rider,” playing cards with “Crooked Jim” Ashley, while Mercedes, the “Belle of Chuckawalla Valley,” dances for a crowd of white and Mexican patrons. She approaches Luke, hands him a rose, and returns to her own background table. Garcia, who covets Mercedes, separates her roughly from another man at her table; Luke intervenes, and draws his gun to force Garcia to drop a knife. After Luke returns to his table, Mercedes comes up behind Ashley, notices how he is cheating, and silently alerts Luke, who struggles with the gambler, shoots him, and flees the saloon, fearing he could be lynched. Luke rides into the desert; Sheriff Stark pursues; Mercedes follows with an extra horse she has stolen and then misleads a posse onto a false trail. Stark catches up with Luke, but Luke wounds him with a rifle shot. He carries Stark to his bare desert cabin, cares for his head wound, and explains why he fled the saloon. Meanwhile, Mercedes bribes the old man whose horses she has stolen and then is relieved to see the posse return to town empty-handed. Stark convinces Luke to return to town and promises to use his influence to exonerate him. On the journey they are waylaid by Apaches who have jumped a reservation; they try to fight off the circling Indians; but the returning posse finds both men and their horse dead.
The film is notable in several ways, perhaps because it took twice as long as usual to shoot. In the extended opening scene, high-angle long shots set up the full space of the saloon, with Luke and Ashley at a foreground table; at key moments, the action is punctuated by close shots of Luke noticing Garcia’s attack, Ashley slipping a card into a hidden table slot, and an exchange of looks between Luke and Mercedes that reveal the cheating. Many extreme long shots frame Luke, Stark, Mercedes, and the posse riding into and through the desert, and an unusual camera angle shows Luke dismounting his horse in the background, disappearing behind a foreground hill, reappearing, and moving into a mid-close-up before he shoots at Stark. Very brief flashbacks to key shots in the saloon emphasize Luke’s confession to Stark that he is attracted to Mercedes and later her own attraction to him. The large band of Apaches appear (in a striking low-angle extreme long shot) riding single file along the crest of a dune, but the “Circle of Death” gunfight is less plausible than most of the attacks in Ince’s earlier Indian pictures (shown at the Giornate several years ago). Two moments near the end, however, more than make up for that. Alternating with the gunfight is a scene of Mercedes looking at herself in a dresser mirror, turning slowly toward the camera, closing her eyes, and bowing her head — as if she realizes that Luke will not return to her. When the posse discover Luke and Stark, a close shot reveals the rose Mercedes gave him clutched in his hand.
Two different plot synopses in the trade press suggest that changes were made in the ending between the film’s publicity and its release. In Reel Life, “Luke, a revolver in either hand, is sitting, propped against a sand hill, his arm riddled with bullets […] across his knees is the body of the dead sheriff.” In Motography, by contrast, “in a thrilling scene,” Luke and Stark “repulse an Indian attack.” While the first synopsis is ambiguous about Luke’s survival or death, the second sets up a possible happy ending. The release print is far more effective by underscoring what turns out to be Luke and Mercedes’s tragic love.

Richard Abel