Gerald Sumner, a young physician and confirmed bachelor, opens his office and finds that he is without patients until a fond mother brings him her son, Bud Woodbridge, whose malady Sumner diagnoses as "love sickness."

A writer rents what he believes is a deserted lodge in order to complete his novel. But then six other people show up one-by-one, each for reasons of their own.

Bodies start mysteriously disappearing from the city morgue. An investigator tries to determine what is going on.

Returning after a long absence, a man learns the woman he fell in love with on the ship going home is his stepmother.

Clancy and MacIntosh are a pair of stock comedy Irish and Scottish plumbers who have been partners for twenty years; but when Clancy accidentally buys some shares on margin, MacIntosh's Scotch thrift rebels and their partnership breaks up. In the meantime, their children are in love...

Wade Rawlings, a former Captain in the Gold Stream Guards, has lost his fortune and has become a wanderer in the United States. He is hired as the Kilbourne-family chauffeur after Mrs. Kilbourne, whose hobby is reforming tramps, takes note of his skill as an auto-mechanic. The rest of the family objects strongly, especially 22-year-old Eileen who takes an immediate dislike to him, but Mr. Kilbourne allows him to stay on. Shortly afterward, Mr. Kilbourne is surprised to learn that Eileen has eloped and he has a new son-in-law, and even more surprised to learn this his son-in-law is the family chauffeur.

While a ship's captain is being slowly poisoned, a gang of thugs try to take over the ship.

Dissension arises between cattlemen in Osage County, Texas, and sheepherders who have settled there and use the same watering stream. Mart Dalton, son of a wealthy cattleman, quarrels with and kills one of the settlers, thus placing sheriff Larry Williams in a delicate position; for he is Mart's best friend and is engaged to Mart's sister June. However, sworn to do his duty, he arrests Mart, incensing the cattlemen, who help Mart escape, leaving Larry wounded.

A foreword warns against the peril of yellow journalism, and the story illustrates it by following events in the upstate New York town of Cornwall after prominant financier George Ferguson is killed. Two types of New York City journalists descend on Cornwall, one interested in facts, the other in getting sensational "news". Mrs. Ferguson is known to have been friendly with a local banker. The Fergusons quarrel the evening he is killed (by "burglars", his wife tells the police later), and she is arrested, spurred on by the "bad" journalists, who also manage to badger the banker's wife into the hospital. Meanwhile, young Bruce Foster runs the Cornwall Courier, and shows the big city reporters how to dig out real news while they attempt to subvert justice for their own ends.