Summary
In a sun-scorched county where carnival bunting flaps like tattered prayer flags, Henry Baird—ink-stained idealist, jalopy-prophet—barters his only possession, a sagging Model-T, for a fistful of raffle tickets and a dream of champagne courtship with Mabel Darrow, heiress to a timber fortune that smells of cedar and paternal distrust. Before the raffle drum stops spinning, the universe issues its ironic invoice: creditors swarm like blowflies, the winning ticket belongs to Joseph Plant—banker, cuckold-in-waiting—whose wife Evelyn still carries the perfume of Henry’s yesterdays, and the car itself is reduced to a pagan pyre by pyromaniac toddlers wielding sparklers and mischief. To quench the debt of honor, Henry volunteers for two weeks of indentured servitude in Plant’s gabled household, a mere hedge away from Mabel’s manicured prison, where every floorboard creaks with surveillance. Joe, half-jailer, half-puppeteer, doles out humiliations—scrubbing grout, emptying slop—while Evelyn’s glances smolder like cigarette holes in linen, feeding rumors that refuse to starve. Into this tinderbox pirouettes Dorothy Kind, self-proclaimed Mrs. Baird, clutching a quartet of borrowed infants and a smile sharp enough to slice bread, turning whispers into front-page scandal just as Mabel’s father sharpens his ax of social execution. Yet Henry navigates the minefield with a newspaperman’s nose for truth and a lover’s threshold for pain, exposing the rival suitor’s forged bonds, dousing literal and figurative fires, and finally trading ink for a ring, proving that even a desperate hero can rewrite the afternoon edition of fate.
Synopsis
Henry Baird, a young newspaperman with a second-hand car but little money, decides to raffle off the car at a county picnic, so that he can take out his sweetheart, Mabel Darrow, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. However, as soon as Henry gets the money, his tailor demands that he pay off his debt. Also, youngsters set the car on fire before he can give to the winner, Joseph Plant, whose wife Evelyn was formerly Henry's sweetheart. Henry arranges with Joe to work for two weeks at no charge at Joe's house, which is next door to Mabel's. Suspecting that Henry and Evelyn are still secretly fond of each other, Joe gives Henry only menial tasks to perform. Despite complications, including misunderstandings on the part of Mabel's father and the arrival of vamp Dorothy Kind pretending to be Henry's wife and the mother of his four children, Henry maintains his honor, thwarts a rival for Mabel's affections, and wins her hand.
