John Howard Payne leaves home and begins a career in the theater. Despite encouragement from his mother and his sweetheart, Payne begins to lead a life of dissolute habits, and this soon leads to ruin and misery. In deep despair, he thinks of better days, and writes a song that later provides inspiration to several others in their own times of need.

Coke Ennyday, the scientific detective, divides his own time in periods for "Sleep", "Eat", "Dope" and "Drink". In fact he's used to overcome every situation with drugs: consuming it to increase his energies or injecting it in his opponents to KO them. To help the police he discovers a contraband of opium (which he eagerly tastes) transported with "Leaping Fishes", and the blackmail of a mysterious man who wants to marry the "fish blower" girl. Will Coke be able to free the girl ?

Winsor Z. McCay bets another cartoonist that he can animate a dinosaur. So he draws a big friendly herbivore called Gertie. Then he get into his own picture. Gertie walks through the picture, eats a tree, meets her creator, and takes him carefully on her back for a ride.

When her father becomes ill, a young woman takes over the telegraph at a lonely western railroad station. She soon gets word that the next train will deliver the payroll for a mining company. The train brings not only the money, but a pair of ruffians bent on stealing it. All alone, she wires for help, and then holds off the bad guys until it arrives.