Summary
In a sun-baked pastoral limbo where rust and clover commingle, James Fisher—calloused dreamer, grease under every fingernail—sacrifices the only certainties he owns: a patch of Kansas loam and the meager coin earned by coaxing life from it. His gamble is a battered truck, a mechanical beast that promises velocity over furrows; one moonlit collision later, the chassis lies twisted like a promise betrayed, and the horizon yawns wider than any cornfield. He bolts for the city’s cathedral of neon, a department-store empire humming on the backs of delivery boys. Behind the wheel of a clattering van he becomes a courier of desire—silk stockings, perfume atomizers, impossible hopes—until a single doorstep encounter with Madge Rathbone detonates his measured solitude. She is both flapper and sphinx, her smile a semaphore of risk; her father, Wilbur, a mercantile patriarch who smells of ledgers and pipe smoke, blesses the courtship with a pat on the shoulder that feels like absolution. Yet the Rathbone sisters—those gilded gatekeepers of respectability—recoil: their boyfriends, a coterie of tailored scorn, frame James for pilfered merchandise, stripping him of job and dignity in one surgical stroke. The city, once a promise, congeals into a courtroom of whispers. Redemption arrives as kinetic coincidence: an armed holdup, a split-second rescue, a headline that flips the script overnight. Ten thousand dollars—blood-warm cash—lands in his palm like a second sunrise; he parlays it into a fleet of smoke-belching wagons bearing his name, and at story’s end he and Madge exchange vows under a canopy of exhaust and orange blossom, the farm boy turned captain of asphalt now immune to the sisters’ sneers.
Synopsis
When James Fisher, a young farmer with an ambition to be a mechanic, smashes up the truck that he has purchased with his savings, he decides to leave the farm for the city. Once there, he finds a job driving a department store truck and one day, while on his rounds, he meets and falls in love with Madge Rathbone. Although Madge's father Wilbur approves of James, her sisters' boyfriends are appalled that she is dating a lowly truck driver. To break up the romance, they get James fired by framing him for thievery. After he saves his former employer from a robbery, however, James is awarded $10,000 with which he starts his own trucking business and marries Madge.
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