Crook Charles Hill Mailes has vowed revenge on District Attorney Wilfred Lucas for putting his brother in prison. He disguises himself as an old woman, but can't get a shot at his target. So he pretends to collapse in front of Lucas' house, and is taken charitably inside. There he threatens Lucas and his son Billy -- played by Edna Foster. They manage to barricade in a room, but Mailes has a gun. Lucas can only delay him -- he has only one arm -- so he sends Billy out the window and in search of help.
It's a well-set-up Griffith short, with one of his patented sequence in which Lucas is trying to hold off Mailes, then cut to the would-be-rescuers, then back to Lucas and Mailes. If it seems a bit hackneyed to the modern audience, it's because Griffith perfected the technique so well that it became a hallmark of screen melodramas that mocked it.