

On a small freighter, Kimble is traveling to Alaska when an FBI agent, named Paul Vale, arrives and begins questioning him and all the passengers in a search for a Korean War criminal and traitor. Vale becomes most suspicious of Kimble, as well as passenger George Banning and his wife Adrienne who are embezzlers fleeing the States. When Vale is found murdered the next day, Captain Carraway interrogates all the suspects and when the captain discovers that Kimble's references are fake, Kimble becomes the chief suspect.
Richard Kimble rides into Tucson, Arizona under the name James Lincoln. He checks into a hotel and finds a job as a bartender at the Branding Iron. He meets Monica Welles (Vera Miles), the piano player who escaped from her stalking jealous husband (Ed Welles) played by Brian Keith.
While working as a handyman in a backwater community in Missouri, Kimble has a few run-ins with a young girl named Jenny Ammory who is a pathological liar who speaks to a rag doll she calls 'Nyet' which she keeps at a nearby pond. Jenny uses Kimble as an excuse when she's late for school when she claims that a man attacked her. When Kimble shows up making a routine delivery of supplies to the school, Jenny identifies him as the man who attacked her. As Jenny's teacher, Emily Norton, speaks to Kimble about Jenny's compulsive lying, Jenny runs home and tells her mother she saw her teacher and the local handyman making out in the barn. Kimble gets roughed up by his co-workers while Emily gets fired and both are advised to leave town. Kimble goes to a school hearing on Emily and tries to clear her by catching Jenny in a lie. But his plan backfires when the skeptic townspeople believe Jenny and decide to form a lynching party to track Kimble down.