- Three farm boys in the Old West help a wounded bank robber who teaches them the trade.
- In the Old West, impressionable teenage farm boys Will, Les, and Tod find an injured bank robber who asks for their help. At first, the boys are scared and reluctant to help, afraid of getting into trouble with the law and their parents. Moved by the wounded man's pleas, they finally agree to hide him in Will's barn and clean his wounds. Over the next few days, they bring food, drink, and clean clothes to the outlaw whose name is Harry Spikes. When the sheriff and his posse come by and ask questions, Will hides the fact the robber is concealed in his family's barn. After he sufficiently recovers, Harry Spikes thanks the boys for their help and vows to return the favor if they ever need his assistance. He takes Will's horse and leaves the county, heading for the Mexican border. Later, Will's parents discover their son's secret mischievous deed and administer a severe beating to teach him to never lie again. Fed up with his father's frequent physical abuse, Will runs away from home. He goes by Les and Tod's homes to bid them farewell. Yearning for adventure in their own lives, Les and Tod also decide to leave home. The three teenagers ride away and vow to have fun free of parental restrictions and interference. However, after a few days without food or money, the boys decide to rob a bank. The bank robbery goes wrong and the boys are on the run toward the Mexican border. In Mexico, they do menial labor to sustain themselves, but trouble is never far away and they end up in a Mexican jail for breaking into a pawnshop. Languishing in jail, the forlorn boys lose hope, but Harry Spikes happens to be passing through town and he finds them and bails them out of jail. In the end, he offers them the opportunity to work with him. The boys agree to form a bank-robbing gang with Spikes as their leader.—nufs68 / edited by Hans Delbruck
- One day, three farm boys come upon a wounded outlaw named Harry Spikes. They take him to one of the boys' barn, nurse him back to health, shield him from a sheriff's posse, and let him go on his way. Later, to escape the tyrannical discipline of their parents, the three boys run away from home in search of adventure and excitement. In the first town they come to, they bungle a bank robbery, and shoot and kill a state senator by accident. Then, with the law in hot pursuit, they flee across the Texas border into Mexico. Upon arriving there, they happily reunite with Harry Spikes. He takes the boys under his wing, teaches them the outlaw's trade, and the four of them cross the border back into Texas. After careful preparation, they attempt a bank robbery that goes horribly wrong. Tragically, the boys discover that Harry Spikes is not the genuine hero that they thought he was. Lee Marvin, Gary Grimes, Ron Howard, and Charles Martin Smith star in this thrilling Western tale that examines the tragic consequences of hero worship and the loss of youthful innocence.
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