- Episode 1: "The Lumber Pirates" "Dollar" Holmes, so called because of his greed for money and power, is a small timberland owner in a region where both the trust and a tribe of Klamath Indians hold similar lands. He is under contract to the combine to deliver to it 10,000,000 feet of timber by a specified date. It is a rich deal. His wife is about to become a mother, and Holmes has set his heart fiercely on a boy to inherit the fortune he means to pile up. A forest fire sweeps away half of Holmes' standing timber. Greer, president of the trust, learning of this, writes a sneering letter hinting at Holmes' ruin unless he fulfills his contract on time. This he cannot do unless he obtains possession of the Indian lands adjoining his. Sleepy Dog, chief of the tribe, refuses to sell. Holmes' wife gives birth to a daughter, and he in a wild rage of double disappointment curses her and the babe, and rushes out of the cabin into the deep woods. He comes upon Dill, a bootlegger, surreptitiously selling whiskey to his loggers. Holmes promises to forebear punishing him if he will go into the Indian camp, from which Sleepy Dog is absent on a trip, and sell his stuff to the savages. The Klamaths are made drunk, and when they demand more whiskey Holmes offers them $100 apiece if they will deed their timber lands to him. They do so, and Holmes wires Greer that he will fulfill his contract; also that with acquisition of the Indian lands he has obtained exclusive right to use of the region's one river for log-floating purposes, thus cutting off the trust's lands from the market. The trust capitulates and accepts Holmes' terms, by which he is given a heavy interest in the combine and made a director. Sleepy Dog returns. Holmes quarrels with him, murders him and throws his body over a cliff. The crime is witnessed by Holmes' wife, a fact which he discovers. In terror of her life, the woman flees the cabin, carrying her infant in her arms. In trying to reach the farther bank of the river over a jam of logs she is hurled into the stream when a blast of dynamite blows up the king-log, and is whirled away in the current, clinging to a log and holding the babe in her arms.—Moving Picture World synopsis
- Episode 2: "The Wreck in the Fog" "Dollar" Holmes lays the foundation for and then builds upon it the vast power and wealth possible to one who dominates the great lumber industry. Believing that his wife and infant daughter have lost their lives in a river accident. Holmes weds the daughter of Greer, president of the Amalgamated, and a son is born to him. In reality, the wife and child he drove from his cabin in his humble days, have been rescued and given a permanent home in a logger's cabin. Twenty years elapse. Holmes' son, Stephen, finished his university schooling and starts home on the steamship Marathon. Helen has developed into a young woman of beauty and courage. The Marathon runs on a reef in a fog, and Stephen, panic-stricken, leaps overboard and swims out to sea instead of into land. Helen, witnessing his plight from a high cliff, but not knowing he is her own father's son, dives into the ocean and rescues him. In appreciation the elder Holmes gives her a position in a station on his railroad. Through that station he sends a telegram ordering his camp foreman to buy the holdings of a small timberman and thereby ruin a group of his neighbors. Helen goes to the man's cabin and warns him. When Holmes' emissaries come to the cabin he refuses to sell, and they shoot him to death. Then comes a wild race by Holmes' men in an automobile and Helen by locomotive and canoe, each intent on first reaching the recorder's office, miles away, and filing on the dead man's lands. The automobile crashes through a condemned bridge and falls forty feet into a river. The occupants of the car swim to shore. On a high trestle Helen's locomotive is stopped, and by means of a rope sling she is lowered into a canoe surface of a stream far below, and starts paddling along a short cut to the recorder's office. At this point the chapter fades out.—Moving Picture World synopsis
- Episode 3: "First Blood" Chapter 2 of this serial closes with Helen and Little Bear, the Indian fireman on "Dollar" Holmes' logging railroad, paddling down stream in a canoe to the recorder's office to beat Holmes' agents (who are racing them in an automobile, but have met with a spectacular accident) in filing on the homestead lands of Dawson, whom Holmes' men have murdered in his cabin. The two canoers guide the frail craft by dexterous strokes through the rapids of a boulder-strewn river in the famed Yosemite Valley of Northern California. They make a safe landing, and strike out afoot for the recorder's office. In the meantime Holmes' men escape death when their automobile crashes through the rail of a bridge and falls sixty feet into a river by swimming to the bank. They arrive at the recorder's office a few minutes after Helen has filed on the coveted land. Coveted particularly by both sides because its title carries with it the exclusive right to float logs to mill from a timber area owned in part by Holmes corporation and in part by small holders, among whom are Helen and a number of her friends. Through the taking up of a friendly subscription to buy Helen a birthday present it is discovered by Holmes' men that she was a few days under eighteen years old, the legal age, when she filed on the lands of the murdered homesteader, and Holmes and his son Stephen (Helen's half-brother, but though neither knows it) on the strength of that fact procure a nullification of her filing and record a new filing in Holmes' name. To offset the loss of their log-floating right Helen and her friends decide to use Holmes' railroad to transport their logs to mill. The logs are loaded. Holmes arrives upon the scene and announces that his road is not a common carrier and will not transport a rival's business. He orders the engine uncoupled from the log train, and departs. The uncoupled and loaded flat-cars are shoved onto a down-grade and sent whirling of their own momentum to the mill. Meantime Holmes' wife has taken a train to meet her husband, at his direction, and there is a wild race with a locomotive with Helen at the throttle to overtake and pass the runaway cars and throw a switch to prevent a fatal collision between the passenger and the freight. The race succeeds, there is a wild fist-fight between the small timber holders and employees of Holmes, the log train eventually reaches the mill, and the logs are unloaded. Helen wires Holmes tauntingly: "Logs at mill. First blood."—Moving Picture World synopsis
- Episode 4: "A Deed of Daring" In order to force the only railroad in their district to transport logs of small-holder rivals of "Dollar" Holmes' timber trust to mill, the small holders and Helen Holmes as railroad station agent frame a conspiracy to have the road declared by the interstate Commerce Commission a common carrier. This chapter tells the story of Helen's efforts to carry out this conspiracy. An agent of the road not familiar with Holmes' announcement that it is not a common carrier and will not handle rivals' business, accepts a package billed beyond the California state line, into Utah. Its delivery at destination will constitute the road a common carrier. Holmes' men find out about this conspiracy immediately after the package has been accepted by the agent, and Holmes is furious. He orders his men to see that the consignment is held up. Helen learns of this plan and undertakes to frustrate it. She leaps on the platform of a flying train, tries the door, finds it locked, and in one of the most spectacular scenes ever shown on the screen climbs by hand-holds from window ledge to window ledge until she reaches the platform of the express car where the package is, and gains entrance to the car just as one of Holmes' men holds up the express agent and tosses the package into a Holmes automobile that is racing alongside the train. Helen doesn't hesitate a moment. She leaps after the precious parcel, and lands in the auto. The men driving it overpower her and throw her out into the road. She is stunned senseless by the fall, but recovers consciousness in time to start the package once more on its out-of-the-state journey. Holmes' son Stephen, Helen's half-brother by her father's second and illegal marriage, though none of the persons involved knows that relationship exists between any of them, acts as his father's agent in trying to stop the shipment of the package, and he does not scruple to resort to pistol-point argument, but without success.—Moving Picture World synopsis
- Episode 5: "The Burned Record" [synopsis not published] Episode 6: "The Spiked Switch" "Dollar" Holmes has a violent scene with the Interstate Commerce Commission, in which the Commission tells him he must build his railroad on to a certain point because the road has been declared a common carrier. He says in order to tie up his rivals by keeping their logs from the mill that he is not in a financial position to do that. The Independents reply that they will take care of that by accepting his note for enough money on which to build the road. Holmes consents and signs the note. Dawson, representing the Independents, accepts the note and sends Helen Holmes and his son, Tom, by train to the bank to discount the note and bring the money back. Holmes sends after them his foreman, Behrens, and a confederate. They have instructions to steal the money and get away with it. so that it shall be impossible for the independents to build the road. Holmes' agents take berth in the same Pullman car with Helen and Tom. When the lights have been turned low and the train is speeding on through the night, the foreman and his pal climb out of their berth windows, make their way by perilous hand-grasps along the outside of the car from window to window, climb in through Helen's berth-window, steal the valise that contains the money from beside her pillow and manage to get back to their own berths. Just as the bag is lifted out of her bed Helen wakes and screams. Her cries bring Tom hurrying from his berth, the conductor at his heels. The train is stopped and Helen and Tom get off to wait for a train which will pass in the opposite direction at dawn and enable them to overtake the thief, who by Behren's secret order has jumped off with the money-bag. In the meantime the thief has jumped a freight, fought with the crew and uncoupled the caboose, on whose narrow platform he is riding. The train is on a down grade. As dawn breaks the runaway caboose comes plunging down the track where Helen and Tom are waiting. Helen climbs a telegraph pole and from its cross-arms leaps onto the caboose roof. She grapples with the thief and they have a savage fight on the platform and inside the car. The car runs into a closed switch and is wrecked. It catches fire from the overturned stove and Helen and the thief try to fight their way out of the burning trap. They cannot. Young Tom Dawson has seen the wreck; he comes racing clown the track to the rescue, not knowing whether either Helen or the robber is alive but hoping for Helen. He tries to get into the burning car, but cannot. He hears the cries of the man and girl inside, and through the smoke and flames he climbs up over the side of the overturned caboose to the window just below the roof, and drags Helen and the robber out. He lifts her to the ground, and discovers that her wrist has been gashed. Her injury makes him forget the thief, who had managed to hang onto the valise of money as he was helped out of the blazing car and who casts gratitude aside and dashes off across the fields with the bag. The fade-out of Chapter Six leaves the audience in doubt as to whether Helen and Tom eventually overtake the robber and recover the money, or whether they fail to and he gets away with it, leaving the small timbermen defrauded and unable to build the railroad extension, and Holmes therefore still the dominant figure in the situation.—Moving Picture World synopsis
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