Loutish Teddy Brant feeling trapped by his marriage and family commitments to the sweet Rose and their infant daughter Helen fakes his suicide and embarks on a dissolute life.
This film is a very loose film adaptation of the 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo and presumed lost: The wealthy girl Esmeralda is kidnapped by gypsies at birth and becomes, as one might assume, the darling of Paris.
When an aviator dies performing in a traveling circus, the circus closes and sideshow con men "Sky-High" Billy Wardell and "Domino" Dominick are arrested for giving out fake watches to wheel of fortune winners.
John Howland travels to the frozen North to build a branch of the Hudson Bay Railroad. There he meets and falls in love with Meleese Thoreau who warns him that her three bloodthirsty brothers, Max, Pierre and François, have sworn vengeance against a man named John Howland, the son of a man who killed their mother, and that torture and death await him along the route to his station.
Truthful Tulliver, a Westerner and a journeying newspaperman, followed by Silver Lode Thompson, printer and compositor, arrives in Glory Hole to start a newspaper.
On the eve of her elopement with Henry Traquair, Margaret Fielding is accidentally discovered in Traquair's apartments by his friends, Captain Richard Haynes and Walter Maxwell.
The relationship between a painter and his lover fractures after the painter finds out she did not acquire a sum of money by selling his paintings, as she had claimed.