Hugh Collier in "The Danger Lover" feels he is living an empty life as little more than a competent bank employee in the town of Stanton. He decides to leave behind a life that for him was a "caricature and savage cartoon of the beautiful truth that life may be" and heads into the mountains alone, carrying only the essentials on his horse. Even though his efforts at hunting and fishing prove to be failures in the early days, he keeps his spirits up by celebrating his small successes as he travels deeper in the wild. Two things change the course of his adventure: he sees a town from a hill, and a stranger, desperate to file on a claim, convinces Collier to trade horses. Walking the stranger's horse into town, he soon finds himself mistaken for the outlaw, Bill Gadsden, by both Gadsden's worshipers and Lassiter, the man after the outlaw.