Summary
A virginal frontier courthouse, its clapboard bones trembling beneath Michigan snow, becomes the arena where conscience duels cupidity in this 1917 one-reel marvel. Donald Keith—green-eyed attorney with city ink still wet on his diploma—rides a nickel-plated bicycle into Owasco, a hamlet whose sawdust lungs wheeze to the metronome of Quartus Hembly’s mills. The lumber baron, a gargantuan silhouette cut from midnight bark, rules through terror and tungsten-bright bribes, his fortune calcified from the stolen marrow of homesteads. Keith accepts the beggared farmer Daniel Kersten’s plea: reclaim the 80 pine-thick acres forged away by Hembly’s crooked surveyors. While poring over blotted deeds, Keith’s heart is quietly commandeered by Thora Erickson, a schoolmistress whose plaits smell of juniper chalk and whose father, unbeknownst to her, once swapped integrity for Hembly’s gold. Discovery ricochets like a split rail: old Erickson’s quivering signature on a fraudulent transfer, the parchment yellow as late-autumn birch. Guilt festers; on a pallet of repentance he utters a death-clotted confession, sealing Hembly’s fate with spectral testimony. But the timber tyrant strikes first: moonless gunfire splinters Keith’s shoulder, jurors are pocketed like pewter tokens, and the trial dawn seems rigged for silence. Bandaged and blood-seeped, Keith nevertheless strides into court, voice a cracked bell summoning every indebted logger, every dispossessed widow. His closing argument detonates; townsfolk storm the docks, torches fizz against the velvet dark, and for once the gavel obeys justice, not cash.
Synopsis
Donald Keith, a young lawyer who takes up residence in the small town of Owasco, Michigan, finds himself opposed by lumber king Quartus Hembly, feared by all the townspeople. Keith takes up the case of Daniel Kersten against Hembly, who has cheated him out of his property, and during his investigation he discovers that the father of Thora Erickson, whom he loves, conspired with Hembly against Kersten, and at length he obtains a deathbed confession from Erickson. Hembly has Keith wounded on the night before the trial and bribes the jury, but Keith appears, stirs up the town in rebellion against Hembly in spite of his weakened condition, and wins his case.
