A young ranch foreman, Bud Drake aka The Kid, is wrongfully arrested for the theft of six-thousand dollars from ranch-owner "Hardshell" Beckett. He escapes and with the aid of Beckett's adopted daughter, Alice, sets out to clear his name.
Mad scientist works on a death ray in his mountain hideaway.
In The Scarlet Brand, a young cowpoke tricked into rustling cattle and hell-bent on getting revenge against the poacher who set him up.
Small-town girl Mary Barry wins a beauty contest and goes to New York to meet D. V. Cortelyou, the magazine's publisher. Greatly taken by young girl, Cortelyou arranges for her to live with Dolly Griffith, a woman of questionable reputation who often aids him in his wicked schemes of blackmail and seduction. During a party seemingly in Mary's honor, Cortelyou obtains some apparently compromising evidence with which to blackmail Mrs. Young, the wife of a wealthy broker; Cortelyou then makes rough advances toward Mary, and one of his assistants, Jack McGuire, gives him a good beating.
Wall Street financier Frederick Searles goes bankrupt, prompting his mercenary wife to marry their eldest daughter Needa to the wealthy, disreputable John Davis Warren, despite Needa's love for Hugh Stanton.
The story of Ethel Armstrong and her father Henry looking forward to her marriage to the ambitious attorney Bruce Steele. Bruce is elected district attorney and goes after a group of food profiteers. Ethel breaks the engagement when her father falls under suspicion as one of the food hoarders.
Jeremy Wales, a crook who stays on the safe side of the law but bends it whenever possible,has tricked short-sighted John 'Dad" Saunders to sign a note for ten thousand dollars instead of the one thousand that Saunders borrowed to work his "Rose o' My Heart" mine. Saunders tells his problem to Phil Lee, a prosperous young rancher, whose method of settling problems has gained him the nickname of "Quick Trigger."
A gang of crooks kills a gold miner while trying to find out the location of the mine. They then terrorize the miner's son to get him to reveal the mine's location.
Esther Wells is dumped by her husband, Martin, just as she's boarding a train. She gets off at the next stop, wanders into a cabin owned by Samuel Radburn, who happens to have been swindled out of a mine by Martin.
Badger, a clerk at a Wall Street brokerage, discovers that his boss Gideon Bloodgood has swindled an investor, Fairweather, out of his money. Fairweather dies of a heart attack after an argument with Bloodgood, and Badger uses this knowledge to blackmail him. By a strange coincidence, Bloodgood's daughter Lucy runs over Fairweather's son, Paul, and cripples him.
