Trooper Hook is a 1957 American Western film directed by Charles Marquis Warren and starring Joel McCrea as the title character and Barbara Stanwyck as the woman he frees from the Indians.
Cavalry reinforcements arrive, and First Sergeant Clovis Hook takes Nanchez and most of his men captive, although a few escape.
She is Cora Sutcliff, who had been taken captive in a raid some years before, while travelling to join her rancher husband, and she has a child named Quito, who is Nanchez’s son.
Cora hits the bully with a shovel, threatening to kill anyone who lays hands on her son, the first words she has spoken since her rescue.
At a stop, Cora and Quito are barred from Wilson’s Restaurant by its owner, so Hook buys cheese sandwiches and they have a picnic by a stream.
The stagecoach picks up and drops off other passengers, including the young Jeff Bennett, whom everyone calls simply “Cowboy.” Cowboy is courteous toward Cora and Quito.
At their next stop, the stagecoach takes on an aristocratic elderly Spanish woman, Senora Sandoval, and her granddaughter, Consuela (sic), who has left her convent school for an arranged marriage.
Rancher Charlie Travers boards, flush with a large sum of money he won in a poker game.
As Trude drives the stage at a breakneck pace it hits a rock, overturns, and damages the coach's suspension.
Cora tells Fred their marriage is over, and asks Hook to take her and Quito back to town.
She asks about the wife and family he referred to repeatedly, and Hook explains they are a fiction he invented to get matchmaking wives to leave him alone.