When New York City police officer O'Malley learns of a young man who is about to embark on a life of crime by taking part in a robbery, he takes the boy aside and tells him the story of Boomerang Bill, another wanna-be gangster who wanted to be a big shot in the New York crime scene. It seems that Bill fell for a pretty young dance-hall girl, and went up against local gang boss Tony the Wop when he insulted her. Tony, who never forgot a slight, found a way to make things very, very tough for Boomerang Bill, in a way that he never saw coming.

Three men in London compete for the love of a dance-hall girl.

The daughter of a Chinese mandarin is sentenced to death for her secret marriage to an American. Their child, raised in the mandarin's palace, grows up and escapes to seek her father, now a high-ranking official in the Philippines.

Henri Labordie (Tavernier) is the father of twins. Jeanne (Taliaferro) is sweet and winsome while her brother Jaques (Taliaferro), pampered by her father, is ill-tempered. When Jaques dies through his own caddishness, Jeanne, to spare her father from the shock, clips off her hair and dons boys clothing so that her father will think that it was her and not Jaques who drowned in a stream. When Labordie dies, Jeanne's deception ends when she goes to Montreal to fulfill an ancient pact, and there she finds happiness

Foreign powers keep getting their hands on U.S. military secrets, so the head of the American diplomatic corps calls in his nephew Dick Stansbury to help. Stansbury knows that Doctor Montell is at the bottom of this, so he poses as an inventor of an innovative aerial gun. This sparks the doctor's interest, and when they both attend a weekend party at the Ryerson estate, Montell tries to get Stansbury to sell the gun to his country.