When Stephens, a British trainer of thoroughbreds, escapes to the colonies in America, he plans to avoid the milieu of racing and training and any publicity that links him with his past. More important, he must elude the occasion of the agents of the British for whom he is a man with a price on his head. Fate, however, brings him and the most notable, the most gossiped about breeding stallion in pre-revolutionary America together in the public eye. He might still eschew this attractive group by remaining in the background and by saying as little as possible, except for his other weakness, a failing that attracts women, particularly those of a higher social class. He is soon drawn into spying for both sides and is in every way becoming the very thing he wished to avoid: a public figure who makes a rather good spy. The British are in the process of disrupting his life when the very horses he has been attempting to conceal deliver him, permanently, from danger.