Summary
A soot-smudged vagrant, nimble as smoke, filches a heel of bread beneath the indifferent gaze of a gas-lamp; his wrist is stayed not by law but by the luminous conviction of a settlement worker whose eyes promise a hungrier dignity. He returns the loot, ducks the butcher’s fury, and stumbles upon a banquet laid like a snare in his path—china gleaming, fowl steaming, destiny smirking. One pulled-out chair later, the profiteering landlord hires the tramp as eviction muscle, trading coins for conscience. Yet the sight of frail bones being booted into twilight flips the moral coin; the tramp’s fists become exclamation points against greed, coins clatter back to the cobbles, and the landlord retreats clutching nothing but wounded pride. Night inks the alleys; thugs, bought with the same greasy rent money, truss the do-gooder girl like a parcel. Our knockabout knight blunders into the skirmish, chaos his only weapon, and somehow—through slapstick providence—unravels her bonds. She drags him home, a stray mongel into marble halls, where the opulent patriarch proves to be the very ogre he had walloped. Cordiality lasts the span of a handshake; father and pauper lock horns again, fists whiffing past faces to punch a steel safe, then a load-bearing pillar. Mansion stones shimmy like stage curtains, burying the lurking kidnapper in a cascade of hubris. Amid dust and moonlight, the tramp limps off, pockets empty yet heart strangely freighted with belonging.
Synopsis
A settlement worker interrupts a tramp in the act of acquiring a meal by the customary methods. She convinces him stealing is wrong and he carries the stolen things back. He escapes the wrath of the owner of the things, and is walking along when he discovered a table filled with food set across his path. He is about to help himself when a chair is placed for him. The profiteering landlord discovers him and gives him some money to evict the aged couple into the street. Seeing the landlord ill-treating the poor old lady, the tramp intercedes and triumphs over the landlord, who departs with the rent money that had been taken from his pockets. The settlement worker is attacked by a band of kidnappers who had been hired by the villain, when the tramp rescues her, quite accidentally, and she takes him home with her. Here he discovers that the landlord that he had the battle with is the girl's father, and who, much to his surprise, greets him cordially. But this attitude is short lived. Getting him alone, the father holds his victim by the throat as he endeavors to strike him in the face. He misses and drives his fist through a steel safe. The tramp feels sorry for him with all his missing and leads him to one of the marble pillars that support his mansion. He backs his victim against that but missing again, knocks the pillar loose, toppling the house about. The villain who had planned the kidnapping of the girl, seeking access to her room, is caught in the debris.
