Johnny Holiday (Allen Martin Jr) is a fatherless boy whose mother (Greta Granstead) is ill in hospital. He hero-worships the psychopathic teenager Eddie Duggan (Stanley Clements). Protecting the thieving Clements, Johnny is sent to a reformatory in Indiana, where he is taken under the wing of Sgt Walker (William Bendix), the bluff but kindly man in charge of the school farm. Walker asks for Holiday to be assigned to him when he realises that Holiday has a natural aptitude for caring for horses, as well as an innocent, sweet nature.