A small-town girl schemes to get to Hollywood only to run into the man she left behind.

The film starts with a woman on the run from her millionaire husband giving birth to a daughter in the home of a washerwoman. The woman dies in childbirth, but the baby survives. The washerwoman leaves the baby in a horsedrawn Parisian taxicab (No. 13). The paperwork of the birth is lost in a huge tome. Sixteen years pass. The tome is bought by a poor student. One day his bookshelf collapses, and the tome opens at the page where the paperwork has been hidden. The student realises that the paperwork relates to a millionaire who has spent the last sixteen years looking for his pregnant wife. The student traces the washerwoman, and he tricks her into confessing what she has done with the baby. Meanwhile, the baby has been adopted by the cab driver and his wife, and has grown into Lili Damita.

Unscrupulous Chicago janitor Paul Kroll uses deceit to fund a return trip to his homeland of Sweden. There, via ongoing continuing deceit and manipulation, he gradually attains a monopoly on the matchstick market in several countries and becomes an influential international figure. Based on the true story of Ivar Kreuger.

Clint Belmet is a bit of a firebrand and is sentenced to at least 30 days in jail, but his partners, Bill Jackson and Jim Bridger talk a sympathetic Frenchwoman named Felice into telling the bumbling, drunken marshal that Clint had married her the previous night. Clint is released so he can accompany Felice on the wagon train heading west to California.