Sylvia Sidney plays a small-town coffee-shop owner who falls for a gangster, ends up in prison and then released in a scheme to trap him.

Mary gets a job as a maid at a hospital, and she meets Barton Powell (Melvyn Douglas), a famous explorer and writer who is recovering from snow blindness.

Mary travels from Oklahoma to Utah and hides out in a small town, but Babe finds her and tries to abduct her during a church service.

Undercover men among the congregation try to arrest Babe, but he shocks the crowd by producing a hand grenade, and he threatens to pull the pin if they don't let him leave with Mary.

Mary is terrified of the homicidal killer, and she hopes he won't find her, but the police succeed in doing so again, and Detective Harper (Wallace Ford), the policeman in charge of the manhunt, takes her to Barton Powell's rustic lakeside house to reunite the couple.