Summary
A gilded cage of chandeliers and calling cards trembles when Winifred Hollywood—heiress to a dynasty stitched from celluloid and scandal—spurns manicured parlors for the sawdust whorls of a ragtag circus, her silk slippers traded for the rippling spine of a bareback mare. Betrothed to Harold Burton, human ledger of a bank whose marble façade is as frigid as his maternal iceberg, she pirouettes on horseback beneath canvas skies, scandalizing the Burton crest and snapping the engagement like brittle bone. Yet the fickle finger of fate, never far from a daredevil, drifts her into moonlit eavesdropping: two laconic brigands blueprinting a vault heist, their whispers curling like cigar smoke around the county’s only safe. Captured, trussed, stowed in the shadowed belly of a grain silo, Winifred’s spark refuses snuffing; Harold, stung by love and pride, swaps patent-leather decorum for flying fists, storming the depot with a kaleidoscope of acrobats, jugglers, and bearded strongmen whose muscles gleam like oiled bronze. In a crescendo of toppling crates, thundering hooves, and canvas tearing open to starlight, the villains are hog-tied for the sheriff. Only then do the ancestral skeletons rattle free: the Hollywoods confess a highwayman swinging from their family tree, while the Burtons mutter of a bare-knuckle brawler whose fists once rewrote census rolls. With pedigrees thus muddied, the lovers reunite, no longer porcelain figurines but flesh, blood, and circus confetti.
Synopsis
Although the prominent Hollywood family prides itself on its illustrious family tree, young Winifred Hollywood exhibits a fondness for wild adventures that greatly disturbs her parents. When Winifred becomes engaged to bank official Harold Burton, his equally snobbish parents visit the Hollywood home and are shocked by the young woman's spirited outbursts and mischievous tricks, and the engagement is broken after she decides to perform bareback feats with a traveling circus. On an evening ride, Winifred overhears two men planning to rob a bank, but when she attempts to phone for help, they make her their prisoner. In trying to rescue Winifred, Harold proves an able fighter, and with the aid of the circus crew, she is freed and the crooks apprehended. The Hollywoods then reveal that one of their ancestors was a bandit, while the Burtons admit that their line included a noted pugilist, and the young people are allowed to resume their romance.
