After a brief view of Edgar Allan Poe's family background, his grandfather, David Poe, Sr., an Irish immigrant to America, and his father, David Poe, Jr., the poet's life is depicted from the death of his mother and his subsequent adoption by John Allan, to his own tortured death in 1849. Expelled from the University of Virginia for incurring too many debts, Poe nonetheless courts and marries Virginia Clemm but is disowned by his foster father. While residing in Fordham, New York, Poe tries to earn a living as a writer but meets with little financial success. Overwhelmed by their impoverished state, Virginia dies and Poe sinks into a profound depression. Always a victim of alcohol and subject to hallucinations, Poe first imagines that his neighbor, Helen Whitman, is Virginia, then plunges himself into an elaborate delusion in which his wife's spirit, various other spectres and a raven finally drive him to his own death.

Kent Hollis has arrived in Dry Bottom, New Mexico to settle the affairs of his dead father. But when he discovers that the town is at the mercy of "Big Bill" Dunlavey and his crew, he decides to stick it out at dad's old ranch for a spell.

When Timothy Atkinson arrives in a rough Western town to become the telegraph operator, the locals peg him as a tenderfoot.

Jim Rose is a young ranch hand in love with the boss' daughter, Mabel. The rancher, King Brentwood, who is being sued for breach of promise by a local widow, opposes the match. Learning that the annoying woman is coming to pay him a visit, Brentwood has his men fake a holdup of her stagecoach.

Nina, engaged to a French captain, and Nancy, engaged to a doctor who runs an insane asylum on an island, are friends. When the doctor catches Nancy kissing the captain, known for kisses with a "heavenly kick," he breaks the engagement. In an effort to win back the doctor for Nancy, Nina pretends to be a bit "off" and becomes an inmate of the sanitarium.

Fired for crashing his aeroplane into his employer's ranch, Tom Mix is elected sheriff in a town with, as a title stated, "a high mortality rate among sheriffs." Mix, of course, prevails against almost impossible odds, at one point cornering a gang of cutthroats holding leading lady Dorothy Dwan captive in the crater of a volcano about to erupt.

The successful operations of a lone bandit known as "The Night Hawk" terrorize a frontier town, and when a stranger arrives riding a fine horse, suspicions are aroused and he is mistaken for the criminal.

While dining in a café with his sweetheart, Ned Hallman nearly swallows a huge diamond which is in his glass of water. He is arrested when he takes it to an appraiser, and is taken to the home of Count LeFebre, who has reported the theft of the diamond and valuable papers.

Sweedie is the scrub lady in the theater. She makes eyes at the stage manager and the hypnotist and is put out of the theater for being so impertinent. Next day while she is out feeding her chickens, she falls asleep and dreams that she has been left an immense fortune by her uncle and that the stage manager and the hypnotist are rivals for her hand.

Old man Suggs was feeling Kippy one day, so his son Joel, a little short of pocket money, persuades him to sign over all his property to him, and relieve the old gent of all the worry, he said. Shortly after, Joel got a hunch that the old Duffer was a nuisance, so sent him to the home for the destitute.