After years of service, the Captain of the Setuckit Life Saving Station on Cape Cod retires, Calvin Homer, the second in command, Calvin Homer expects to be promoted; but the appointment goes instead to Bartlett, a religious fanatic who has been the recipient of a good deal of favorable newspaper publicity.
When drunken Canadian trapper Raoul La Fane attacks his young wife Marie, she takes a shot at him. La Fane falls, and Marie, thinking she killed him, flees into the white wilderness.
A twenty-year veteran of the printing room of The San Francisco Chronicle is passed up for a promotion at the same time his son is accused of graft and involved in scandal.
Dress model Sheila Conroy loses her job after ruining a gown she borrowed from her employer. Harlan, a criminal posing as a government agent, offers Sheila work as his assistant.