Summary
A sun-bleached ranch hand, Hugh Jordan, inherits a gilded avalanche of tainted bullion from the uncle who once pick-pocketed the Winthrop siblings’ patrimony. Riding east on the iron horse, he transmutes dust into champagne, purchasing a marble menagerie where jazz-age bacchanals throb until dawn. One candle-spattered evening, the butler ushers in three spectral wards—Penelope, Cordelia, and little Hypatia Winthrop—clutching a holographic will that commands Hugh to safeguard a fabled lode. Their father’s ink still smells of gun-oil and regret. Overnight, the bachelor’s playground becomes a nursery of glances: Penelope’s level gaze slices through Hugh’s ennui like a stiletto through silk, while a mercenary widow, draped in onyx and ennui, circles with matrimonial talons. A Wall Street hyena, smelling blood in the orphaned trust, schemes to brand Penelope a fortune hunter. Yet every ledger line bends toward the same denouement: the claim is real, the guilt hereditary, the heart salvageable. Hugh signs away his sire’s plunder, slips a sapphire on Penelope’s war-worn finger, and the millions stay—purified—within a newfound family stitched from contrition and desire.
Synopsis
Young Hugh Jordan, the nephew of the man who robbed the Winthrop children, is earning his living out west when he comes into the millions of his thieving old uncle. Hugh goes east and settles down to a life of ease and enjoyment. He is entertaining a stag party at his home when the butler announces the arrival of the Misses Winthrop. A letter left by their father told them to go to Hugh Jordon, as he held a mining claim in trust for them. Penelope, the oldest girl, shows the letter to Hugh and he invites the orphans to remain until he has investigated the matter. It is all plain sailing after that, and Hugh marries Penelope and the fortune is kept in the family. There is a slight underplot involving a handsome widow, who tries to capture Hugh, and a most despicable specimen of the wealthy class who tries to ruin Penelope.
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