Lieutenant Willis returns home from France, where he was an aviation ace, to find that his father has been falsely jailed for the murder of Judson Blair.

First one stranger, then another, arrive at the presidio, each with a government pass and each claiming to have been robbed by the notorious Captain Fly-by-Night and his highwaymen. The soldiers and Señorita Anita believe the first to be Fly-by-Night and the second to be Señor Rocha, Anita's fiancée and emissary of the governor. But the first stranger, to whom Anita is drawn, proves to be on a government mission and exposes the second stranger as Captain Fly-by-Night.

Convinced by a vacationing professor that he should get an education, Charles Taylor abandons his cowboy life for college. He finds that higher education involves more than books, however, when the sophomores select him as an ideal subject for hazing.

The King of Illyris marries a neighboring princess, who finds out he has a mistress, Sephora. Revolted, she turns to Prince Alexei for friendship. Turmoil increases as a revolution demands the abdication of the King and the Queen opposes this decision.

Minnie, the village tomboy, meets a handsome Stranger after playing ball one afternoon. She invites him to see a bridge model her father has designed; but finding her intoxicated father in the act of destroying the model, she swears vengeance on the local bootleggers and joins a newspaper as sportswriter so as to expose their activities. Pike, the station agent, leader of the bootleggers, spreads a scandal about Minnie when she rejects him, but through the help of the Stranger everything is cleared up.

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.