In the Yukon, searching for gold, Hurricane picks up a paper and discovers that the girl back home is planning to marry another man. Abandoning all care, Hurricane is soon embroiled in a fight in which guns play a part. It is then that the true value of one of his companions, Flossie, a girl of the gold-fields, becomes apparent.
With the California Gold Rush beginning, Senator Frost's singing daughter Caroline loves a young army officer; the Senator can't stand him, and has him sent to California.
A few decades after the destruction of the Inca Empire, a Spanish expedition led by the infamous Aguirre leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon River in search of the lost city of El Dorado.
During the Klondike Gold Rush, a misanthropic cattle driver and his talkative elderly partner run afoul of the law in Alaska and are forced to work for a saloon owner to take her supplies into a newly booming but lawless Canadian town.
Charming, blithely amoral devil-may-care rogue Jesse Smith and peaceful, devout straight-arrow Mormon Lester O'Hara are estranged half brothers who are reunited after receiving a sizable inheritance from their deceased mother.
Among the travelers of varied backgrounds that meet and interact on one night at Union Depot, a metropolitan train station, are Chick and his friend Scrap Iron, both newly released from prison after serving time for vagrancy.
Thelma and Zazu are on a leisurely excursion in a borrowed car. Thelma lets Zazu drive. When she brakes to avoid a bull pulled along by three rustics, her foot gets stuck and the car crashes through a barn.
Stephan Gregorovitch, the unwilling king of a bankrupt Ruritanian country, along with his hucksterish chancellor and musically-inclined bodyguard, travel incognito to London for some fun.
A foreword warns against the peril of yellow journalism, and the story illustrates it by following events in the upstate New York town of Cornwall after prominant financier George Ferguson is killed.
