Traveling Salesman

A prank diverts footloose drummer Bob Blake to a whistle-stop junction; dusk finds him rattling the locked door of a for-sale Victorian, its clapboards sighing like a wind-battered harmonica. One forced window later, candlelight spills across oak parquet and the wandering man becomes an overnight squatter, brushing dust from stair-rail finials as though appraising a cathedral. Dawn reveals Grand River—a Main Street petrified in amber, telegraph wires humming gossip above hitching posts. Here Bob meets Beth Elliott, the house’s absent owner, whose eyes carry the glacial blue of winter wheat; in their first shared frame the camera lingers on her glove tugging at a gate latch, a tremor that forecasts the deed and dowry tempest to come. Enter Martin Drury, city-booster turned political spider, spinning rumors that the railroad will pay a king’s ransom for the property. Drury enlists Franklin, a dandified suitor whose cravat is as tight as his ethics are loose, to pressure Beth into a fire-sale. Bob, smitten and ever the road-wise huckster, races the cabal to the tax office, slapping down coins like poker chips. Beth, misreading his zeal as manipulation, signs Franklin’s contract—only to discover a frontier statute: a wife cannot alienate land without spousal consent. Solution? A lightning marriage to Bob, a legal judo flip that turns the villains’ own paperwork into handcuffs. The final tableau frames the newlyweds on the depot platform, trunks labeled ‘Kansas City’ and ‘Denver’—a promise that home, for a traveling salesman, is wherever the next punchline isn’t.