Summary
A prankish cowpoke, ousted from the Diamond K for turning the boss into the butt of every saddle-sore jest, drifts toward the fly-speck town of Freloe Beanos and stumbles upon Percival Longstreet—erudite, shattered, ribs creaking like old parchment—whose destiny as schoolmaster has been derailed by a runaway wagon. In the lacquer of twilight the scholar bemoans starvation for himself and for Dolly, his epistolary sister already en route; the cowboy’s heart, never before flexed toward empathy, swells like a monsoon cloud and he swears to wear Percival’s tweed, wield his birch, and counterfeit learning beneath the clapboard bell tower. Illiterate hooves still crusted with prairie dust, he stumbles through declensions and long division, yet the town elders—drunk on his frontier charisma—applaud the performance; Dolly, luminous with ink-stained fingers and Romantic verses, discovers in the impostor a sunburned Galahad and surrenders her guarded heart. Otheloe Actwell, local thespian and collector of gasps, sniffs subterfuge, unmasks the cowboy, and strips him of chalk and paycheck; but when footlights dim and villainy skulks toward the box office, the disgraced teacher vaults from orchestra pit to balcony, thwarts the robbery, and gallops from pariah to peacekeeper on a single tide of gun-smoke applause.
Synopsis
After Bob Baldwin is fired for playing too many jokes on the tenderfoot owner of the Diamond K Ranch, he sets out for the nearby town of Freloe Beanos and meets Percival Longstreet on the way. Percival has been seriously injured in an accident and is therefore unable to assume his duties as the town's new schoolmaster. Distressed, Percival confesses that he and his sister Dolly, who is en route to the town, are doomed to starve, which so moves Bob that he agrees to serve as the schoolmaster during Percival's convalescence. Although the uneducated cowboy suffers great discomfort in the classroom, he pleases the town authorities and charms Dolly, who soon falls in love with her supposed brother. Actor Otheloe Actwell becomes jealous of Dolly's affections for Bob, and upon discovering that the cowboy is an impostor, he has Bob fired. Soon afterwards, Bob prevents Actwell from robbing the box office, whereupon the townspeople elect him the new sheriff.
