A young Anglican clergyman gets on the night express to London at Edinburgh station and joins an elderly gentleman in the compartment. Gradually, the journey gets under way, during which it turns out that both are apparently secret agents.
In 1913, in Oklahoma, oil derrick owner Lena Doyle, aided by her father and a hobo, is stubbornly drilling for oil despite the pressure from major oil companies to sell her land.
Don Serafin has a complex: to all the beautiful women always seen with a beard. To remove the complex and try to cure him, his friends will lead to Biarritz.
A couple is suffering from sexual estrangement. The husband is having an affair with his secretary and the wife takes up with Sandra an interior decorator.
Pa, a moonshining chicken farmer, is worried that his dim-witted son Junior is becoming way more attracted to their cow Sassy Sue than he should be, so he sets out to gather up all the nubile young farmgirls in the area and get them to show Junior what he's missing.
The story of a peasant whose harshness and bluntness only provoke disputes and anger, and his honesty and sense of truth and honor in conjunction with the previous qualities only exacerbate these disputes.