Harry Wentworth is the profligate son of a ranch owner. His father is tired of Harry's irresponsible drinking and gambling and banishes him from home. Harry becomes a sailor, but right away gets in trouble with the captain. The hard work does him good, however, and when he feels he's had enough of the captain's brutality, he escapes overboard with a couple of friends, whom he takes to his father's ranch. Back home he discovers that his father is in danger of losing his ranch to scheming lawyer Jim Martin. Martin is in love with Ethel Crandall, the sister of gambler Ralph Crandall.

Dorothy Madison, a secret service operative, is sent into the West Virginia mountains to locate a still, after male operatives failed. She carries a sketching outfit and a carrier pigeon into the moonshine country, and hides the pigeon in the woods near a mountain cabin, where she hopes to make headquarters. She walks along the road until she sees Dave Parks coming, falls, feigns a sprained ankle, and is taken home by Dave, who is a young, good-looking moonshiner. Dave's mother is a sour-faced, pipe-smoking, suspicious old mountain woman, and only tolerates Dorothy. Nell Oatsey, typical mountain girl of bold beauty, hears of Dorothy's plight and goes to see her. She carries her rifle.

Erma Desmond leaves her uncle and aunt to visit a friend, Phyllis, in the city. There, she finds work as the companion to the highly temperamental Mrs. Stanley. Mrs. Stanley has terrorized her husband to such an extent that he has gone away for a few months, purportedly to take their daughter to school, but mainly to get some peace. The servants, however, are still victims of her terrible fits until the day she decides to head for Reno to get a divorce.

Arnold Truesdell, a rich invalid, requests his secretary, Robert Sheridan, to summon his lawyer. Truesdell is the foster father of Marion Robertson, the child of his bosom friend who died some time ago. His happiness with the little girl was soon dissipated, for she was kidnapped by a gypsy whose enmity he had aroused.

Conchita Cordova sings in the cathedral choir in her village of San Miguelito near the Rio Grande. Millionaire oil man John Rannie, whose oil fields have displaced the peasants, desires Conchita, and when he learns that her fiance, Juan Mendoza, has been employed by Adolf Wylie, a German spy, Rannie threatens to expose Juan unless Conchita gives herself to him.

After a love triangle results death, St. Elmo falls from grace and is eventually redeemed in this now lost silent film based on the best selling novel by Augusta Jane Wilson.