Summary
A candle-scented corridor of stone and hush: Marta Estevan—veil still clinging to her hair like a ghost of girlhood—steps beyond the convent gate only to collide with the copper stink of gunpowder on the frontier. She saves Bryton, the laconic American whose eyes carry the burnished dusk of a thousand unmapped rivers; in the tremor of that rescue a new liturgy, profane and electric, replaces her vanished vows. Dona Luisa, iron-willed chatelaine of the Artega hacienda, sees in the orphan nun a moral tourniquet for her libertine son Rafael, a gambler of fortunes and flesh. Through forged letters and a staged death she stitches Marta into a matrimonial chastity belt, but the yarn frays when Bryton—blood still crusted on his shirt—gallops back across the mesquite, trailing truth like a comet. What follows is not a polite triangle but a crucible: sacred medals clatter against revolvers, wedding wine sours into arsenic, and the confessional becomes a shooting gallery. Beneath the parchment sun of a California standing in for Old Spain, loyalties combust, revealing that salvation can wear spurs and damnation sometimes carries a rosary.
Synopsis
Marta Estevan is ready to leave the convent where she has been reared. Dona Luisa Artega, mother of Rafael and the young girl's guardian, arranges a marriage between the two, because she thinks that Marta's influence will rescue her son from the wild life he is leading and make a man of him. Marta rescues the American Bryton, when he is attacked by Indians, and falls in love with him. Rafael's mother sends Bryton away by telling him that the girl has entered a convent for life, and after telling Marta that Bryton had been killed on the trail she exacts a vow from the girl that she will marry her son. Marta marries Rafael. Bryton comes back after the marriage and after Marta has found out the true character of her husband. The story moves on from this point to a happy ending, but with much action of tense and strenuous nature in between. - Moving Picture World, May 15, 1920.
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