Steel

Martin Van Buren, the steel magnate, introduces the Count de Fourviers to his daughter, Nancy, in hope that she will marry a title. Nancy finds the French nobleman amusing, but her heart and soul are bound up in her father's technical expert, Gannett Roberts, a splendid American, who is working to perfect a formula of his which will revolutionize the steel industry by producing a metal as resistant as steel, but of only half its weight. Roberts feels that if he can only amass a fortune, he may be able to win Nancy's hand. Success crowns his efforts and he submits his precious new metal to a stringent test under the direction of the naval authorities. Van Buren, realizing the tremendous value of Robert's formula, invites him to the house and asks him to name his own price. Robert loses his head and blurts out that he wants nothing but Miss Nancy, for she would be all in all to him. The magnate sneers at the inventor's presumption, and seeing Nancy with the count at the end of his spacious hall, points towards them, and tells Roberts that she is not for such as he, but has been nurtured to grace the family tree of France's most aristocratic family, the Fourviers. Roberts takes her engagement to the count for granted and leaves dejectedly. Van Buren quickly gets into communication with Luigi, an unscrupulous employee of his, and tells him the formula must be obtained from Roberts regardless of ways or means. Accordingly, Luigi arranges to have two pals of his trip up Roberts, with whom he has scraped an acquaintance. When the tripping occurs Luigi deftly "frisks" Roberts' billfold, which contains the valuable formula. They part shortly after. Roberts suddenly becomes suspicious of the glib stranger and searches his pockets. Upon discovering that his billfold is missing, he follows Luigi, and reaches his door just as the thug motors off to the Van Buren's mills. Roberts and his assistant, Cherry (whom he had fortunately met with), cling to the rear of the machine, but its careenings throw them off when they have almost reached the end of the trip. Leaving the injured Cherry on a rock, Roberts overtakes Luigi just as he has concealed the billfold under a secret trap in the cellar of the mills. In accordance with Van Buren's instructions. Luigi refuses to return the stolen billfold or to reveal its whereabouts. They engage in a struggle, and Roberts is almost overcome, when Cherry, who has limped to the mills, enters on the scene with a revolver, and holds off the ferocious Italian. Then Roberts and Cherry bind Luigi to a stone post, and leave him with the cheerful information that the gunpowder fuse they light near him will blow him and the mill to atoms in an hour, unless Van Buren will force him to give up the formula. Roberts forces Luigi's chauffeur to drive Lira to a doctor's, where he leaves young Cherry, and then to the Van Buren mansion. Although it is late, he forces the butler to call his master. But Nancy meets the butler on his way to her father, and learning that Roberts is downstairs, hurries to find out what brought him there at that hour. With bloodshot eyes and bot breath he jerkily tells her of the theft of his precious formula, the work of a lifetime, by her father's hirelings, and that very shortly the powder mills, in which Luigi is bound, will blow up unless her father will restore the formula to him. She sees that he is maddened at his loss, and soothes him by telling him how much she loves him, that she will straighten everything out for him, if he will only drive back as fast as he can and save the mills and the man. Nancy almost drags Roberts to the machine, and they begin a breakneck trip against time. Luigi, after struggling against his fetters until the blood flowed at shoulders and wrists, was enabled, by superhuman efforts, to reach the key controlling the secret trap. It flew back with enough force to extinguish the perilously short fuse, then he became unconscious from exhaustion. Roberts was relieved at this discovery when he arrived, and overjoyed to discover his billfold, with the formula intact, where it had been concealed under the trap. He cut Luigi's ropes and released the man. Walking out in the clear air, he was inspired by seeing the country-side parson's beacon lights glimmering in the distance to ask Nancy to marry him then and there. She bravely consented, with the stipulation that he must get into communication with her father and get his consent. So they telephoned from the parsonage, and the discomfited magnate reluctantly withdrew his objections when Nancy told him she would never become a countess, and had the formula he wanted anyway. So they were married.