Summary
A dew-drenched whistle-stop, all clapboard and church bells, exhales its gullible jewel: Ernie, the grocer’s son whose guilelessness gleams like a new nickel. Urban sharpies—slick as oil on wet pavement—spot the lamb, spin him tales of Manhattan nectar, and siphon him into their chrome-and-chalk con. In the city’s vertical labyrinth he learns the lexicon of mirrors: every handshake a forgery, every grin a ledger entry. Overnight the hayseed becomes a virtuoso of short-change and shell games, his blush traded for a sharkskin smile. Yet the metropolis, that phosphorescent seductress, exacts tuition: a midnight epiphany in a pawn-shop window, where his reflection wears the same freckles he once showed the girl who waited by the millpond. Shame floods him like ice water; he bolts homeward, pockets full of tainted bankrolls and a heart scabbed with self-loathing. The sweetheart, steadfast in calico, haunts the edge of his vision, but contrition chains his tongue. Just as contrition calcifies, the predators slink back, brandishing Kodak negatives and venal grins, ready to auction his disgrace. Ernie, stung awake, turns the con inside out: in a barn-storming purge of fisticuffs and confessions he scours the rot, burns the evidence, and steps—bloodied but unbroken—into dawn’s first hymn. The final shot lingers on a half-open parlour door: outside, crimson sunrise; inside, a trembling hand reaching for a rust-dappled bicycle bell—an unspoken covenant that innocence, once squandered, can still be reforged, dented yet ringing.
Coaxed by sharpers, who seek to profit by his rustic innocence, the boy from the small town goes to the city with them and become, innocently enough, a successful swindler, but he learns of the deception and returns home, too ashamed to seek his old sweetheart. The crooks return to try a blackmail game, but Ernie's eyes are opened now. He cleans up in whirlwind fashion.
