William Cameron Menzies

Best friends Clay Clayburn and Will Denning graduate from West Point only to soon find themselves fighting on opposite sides of the Civil War. When the two men meet each other in combat, neither knows it as each is in an artillery position hundreds of yards from the other. However, the love of Clay's life, Kathy Summers, does know and tries desperately to save her two good friends from killing each other.

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.