Barbary Graham at fifteen envisions a life of horseback riding at her father's side as being far preferable to sewing in the company of her mother and sisters. Then Gray Drummond appears. When they meet on a hill outside her home, when he appears over the horizons, he seems to her to be authoritative, intelligent, yet coarse. To him, she is not a girl at all, but rather, a boy. When he discovers she is in fact a young woman, a woman dressed as a boy, a tomboy, of fifteen, her brash tone convinces him she is a woman of spirit, a woman to match his own energies. He asks her father for her hand in marriage.