Summary
In the mist-curtailed hollows of Little Smoky, where cedar breath mingles with gun-smoke, a feud unfurls like a blood-rimmed petal: the Brocktons—moonshiners, poachers, keepers of outlaw hearth—see their birthright forests suddenly ring-fenced by federal ink. Enter ranger Bob Hayne, badge bright as a fresh scar, heart tethered to Anne Brockton, whose eyes hold both flint and frost. Their courtship is no pastorale but a sparring match across fault-lines of law and lust: Bob’s chivalry toward Gita, a copper-skinned Gypsy princess with violins in her pulse, ignites Anne’s green-flamed jealousy; yet Gita’s later rescue of Bob from a snarling cougar tilts the moral axis. When Bob seizes Anne’s patriarch for flouting game statutes, Anne pilfers the condemning ledgers, shredding jurisprudence with a lover’s contempt. A bullet meant for Bob fells Ed Brockton; hounds taste the false scent and chase the ranger through laurel thickets. Anne, swapping petticoat for ranger khaki, leads the pack astray while tempest clouds rip like wet canvas. She stumbles on Ed—alive, contrite—inside Bob’s cedar-log refuge, proving love’s alchemy can resurrect the presumed dead. Meanwhile Tom, her shell-shocked brother who carries Verdun’s thunder in his skull, hunts a renegade Indian stalking Gita; their entwined salvation becomes a psalm to fractured minds. At dawn, both couples converge on the riverbank, rifles lowered, hearts unclenched, the forest reclaiming its cathedral hush.
Synopsis
When the government turns the Little Smoky region into a forest and game preserve, the Brocktons challenge their rights to use the area as they please. Forest ranger Bob Hayne , falls in love with Anne, daughter of the Brockton clan leader; but Anne is jealous when Bob defends Gita, a Gypsy princess, from unwelcome attentions and when the Gypsy later saves his life. Bob arrests Anne's father for breaking the game laws, but Brockton is acquitted when Anne steals the evidence. In a row following the trial, Bob is trailed by hounds when he is believed to have killed Ed Brockton. Anne dresses in Bob's clothes to mislead the hounds, and during a storm she finds Ed alive in Bob's cabin. Tom, Anne's brother who was shell-shocked in France, saves the Gypsy, whom he loves, from a renegade Indian, and both couples are happily united.
