Yuma is accosted by two ex Yankee Prisoners seeking to take gold from a Captain Pollack who later Yuma learns is a demented ex-Confederate prison officer who hoards prisoner mined gold with which he plans to reverse the outcome of the war.

Yuma kills a man appointed sheriff by his gang leader brother who seeks revenge by intimidating the fearful townspeople into not transacting any business with him.

Yuma visits his former commanding officer Quincy Bannister who is irrationally and overtly pursuing the prosecution of alleged murderer Newt Schofield.

Yuma is in town to deliver a letter to Lick Stribling when he is targeted by young Virgil Moss who wants to make his name as a gunfighter to defend his family name against the charge of cowardice.

When Yuma comes to meet a unknown woman who has written him, he discovers her grave, and her embittered brother digging a grave for Johnny Yuma, whom he blames for her death. But Johnny never met the girl, so he joins the man incognito to find the impostor.

Johnny signs on as a hand for a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, former Union soldier Paul Travis, who has settled for health reasons among Confederate sympathizers who mean him harm.

Yuma comes upon a woman whose mind has become unstable after the murder of her husband. After the woman mistakes Yuma for her dead husband, he takes her for medical treatment and baits a trap for the murderers.

Yuma arrives in town to begin his job as bodyguard for a man who is killed upon his arrival. Oddly the townspeople are elated by the death but Yuma is determined to have justice and receives unwanted assistance.

General Grant pays a post-war visit to the South, and Johnny tells young Jimmy the story of Lee's surrender.

Yuma buys the contract of a war buddy, who is now a boxer past his prime, and attempts to discourage the friend from further competition.

Yuma stops at a bar where a bounty hunter is holding the wife of the outlaw he hopes to collect on. Seeing Yuma's descriptive resemblance to the outlaw, the bounty hunter decides upon an alternative plan---killing Yuma and passing him off as the outlaw. Will the wife go along with this idea?

John Sims, Yuma's godfather, saves him from an attack by Indians at his campsite. He asks Yuma in turn to help him track renegade Indian Masi and take his scalp, as revenge for the killing of his wife.

Yuma aids Ulysses Bowman in a gun battle and accompanies him back to his camp where Yuma learns that Ulysses is in the habit of offering a chest with two hundred dollars to any man who will marry his daughter Felicity.

A woman doctor, her sister, and their ailing father have been left behind by townspeople fleeing hostile Indians. A group of Mexican insurgents led by a demagogic Commandante and bent on reclaiming old Spanish Land Grants arrive in town to take advantage of the situation.

When Yuma arrives to give Laurie Buford her late father's affects, he learns that she is being forced into marriage to a brutal man, so he vows to stop the marriage.

George Campbell, who blames Yuma for his brother's death in the war, provokes a gun battle in which Yuma is wounded after being forced to kill Campbell's nephew. Yuma's godfather John Sims then comes to help Yuma escape from Campbell's vengeance.

When a newswoman observes Yuma defending a boy against an adult bully, she decides to promote him as the typical Western hero in a news story, much to the Yuma's displeasure and possibly detrimental to his safety.

Yuma rescues Arthur Sutro, who was staked to an ant hill by Indians. Sutro tells Yuma he is responsible for him now. But Sutro wants to rob Yuma's peacefully reclusive and scholarly friend Portal of an imagined fortune of gold.

Yuma is on a mission to rescue his cousin Eddie who has become a student of gunslinger Dawes.