Two bumbling detectives help a stage actress who has been receiving threatening letters.

"Chick" Thompson is a puppet-master in a traveling carnival whose wife dies in childbirth and leaves him with an infant son he names "Poochy." His father-in-law and the baby's grandfather sues him for custody of the baby and Chick takes his son and hides out for a couple of years. He joins his former assistants, Daisy and "Fingers", in a circus act only to find that the persistent grandfather is still on his trail.

After a love affair ending in an abortion, a young prison reformer submerges herself in her work. She then falls for a controversial and married judge and scandal looms again.

An eclectic group of people are stalked by a masked killer in an old mansion.

Buck Allen, The Cheyenne Kid, has been accused of holding up the payroll car of the Cody Dam Construction Company, and is being pursued by U.S. Marshal Utah Kane and Sheriff Hank Bates but they lose him.