Wayland Jackson, a widower with a young daughter, moves to a small, impoverished mountain village in North Carolina, circa 1934. They are taken in by Collie Wright, a single mother with an illegitimate baby, and she and Wayland soon fall in love. Trouble starts when the identity of her baby's father is revealed.
A career criminal who has been deformed since birth is given a new face by a kindly doctor and paroled from prison. It appears that he has gone straight, but he is really planning his revenge on the man who killed his mentor and sent him to prison.