Charles Bronson portrays a drifter outlaw, Graham Dorsey, who has a liaison with a writer (Jill Ireland) who is so taken with him that she transforms him, after his death, into a legend. She builds a great commercial empire based on her fictional re-creation of "Graham Dorsey." Dorsey''s name becomes a hallowed legend of the Old West. When Dorsey turns up very much alive, no one recognizes him or believes that he is Dorsey--including Ireland. Now a myth, but no longer possessing his own identity, Dorsey will end his days in an asylum where the kindly doctors will humor this old man''s charming delusion that he was once a great gunfighter. Based on the novel by Frank D. Gilroy.