During the journey back to Darkwood, Zagor and Chico arrive in the town of Winnfield, South Carolina. Here they discover that their friend Gambit is locked in Sheriff Atkinson’s cell, awaiting transfer to the gallows. A death sentence for murder hangs over the head of the beautiful adventuress, after she was found next to the freshly killed body of a man named Clive Howland. Gambit claims she remembers nothing because she was coming off a heavy drinking binge, and Zagor, convinced of his friend’s innocence, decides to clear her name by finding the real killer, someone who cleverly set her up.
The only clue leads to the ranch of Mister Wallardy, an arrogant landowner whom the charming girl had cleaned out at the gaming table the night before the murder. The Spirit with the Hatchet goes to investigate on the rancher’s land and almost immediately clashes with his shady foreman, Rourke, and the cowhands under his command.
During the night, Gambit is broken out of jail by one of Rourke’s men, which strengthens Zagor’s belief that the adventuress was framed precisely by Wallardy. Returning to the ranch, Zagor is captured by Rourke and, before freeing himself (and teaching both him and his employer a hard lesson), manages to ascertain that Wallardy is actually unrelated to the affair in which Gambit has been involved: the ranch hand who freed her, Fosbury, had in fact been hired only a few days earlier.
Escaping into the prairie, Zagor runs into Gambit, who reveals why Fosbury freed her. He and Howland, whose real name is Jack Chairs, had committed a robbery together and then split up. Of the two, Howland was supposed to hide the loot, so Fosbury believed that Gambit had killed his partner after making him reveal where the gold was hidden. After freeing her and discovering that she knew nothing about it, he beat her and abandoned her on the prairie.
Gambit is captured by the men of Winnfield while Zagor sets out in search of Fosbury, intending to bring him to the sheriff, convinced that he is the murderer of Howland. Instead, this proves not to be the case and, unfortunately, Fosbury is killed during an attempted escape.
Meanwhile, Gambit, sentenced to death for a murder she did not commit, climbs the gallows with dignity to be hanged, when the execution is stopped by Sheriff Reiser, who arrives with a bound prisoner: Howland, the very man whose death Gambit was accused of, allowing her to go free.
But what happened? It is Zagor who reveals the truth. Howland had thrown the gold into a lake, intending to keep it all for himself; however, a bounty hunter was on his trail, whom he managed to kill. By disfiguring the man’s face, he passed the corpse off as his own, shifting the blame onto Gambit, thus making himself completely free to recover the gold, since everyone believed him dead.
Zagor had intuited all this and managed to capture Howland, handing him over to Reiser and asking for his help in stopping the execution of his friend.
