Hud Bannon has always preferred drinking, fighting and womanizing to the very traditional ways of his father. Hud is a man who cares more for himself than he does his young nephew, his dad, or even their understanding housekeeper. When disease threatens the cattle on the Bannon Ranch, the conflict between Hud and his old-line father reaches an all time high.

A young woman in a small Mississippi town in the 1930s falls in love with a railroad worker who was sent to their town to lay off the men working on the railroad.

When an aspiring doctor loses the one woman in his life to a tragic and untimely death, he goes off to Europe to forget. While he's gone, his friend Drake loses his inherited fortune and his fiance. He takes up with a woman "from the wrong side of the tracks" and an ensuing accident leaves him a cripple. When Cummings, now a full-fledged doctor returns home, it takes everything he has ever learned and experienced to put things right again.