American Aristocracy (1916)

Leander Hick is anxious that his daughter should marry Percy Horton, a wealthy manufacturer, who has dealt extensively in war munitions and who has secretly sold to the Mexican government despite a government prohibition forbidding it. Horton is a mollycoddle and in no way measures up to Miss Hick's ideas of the man she wants to marry, Horton's legitimate business is the manufacture of malted milk. One day Miss Hick declares to a number of girl friends with whom she is riding in her machine, that she intends to kiss the first real man she sees. As the machine rounds a corner, Miss Hick sees in the roadway a beautiful specimen of young-manhood. He is unknown to her. In reality he is Cassius Lee, the son of an old aristocratic family with unlimited wealth. Lee has volunteered his services as a secret service agent to the government. The unexpected osculation over with, Miss Hick jumps back into the car and speeds away. The young man decides he will know the girl and proceeds to haunt all the hotels. There is to be a ball that night at the best hotel in the place and the young man attends. So does Miss Hick, accompanied by her father and Percy Horton. While young Lee, who chances to be attired exactly the same as Percy Horton, is standing on the edge of the crowd, trying to pick out the girl of the afternoon, a Mexican spy who is disguised as a hotel porter, slips up beside him and mistaking him for Horton, puts a note in his hand. Lee's suspicions are aroused when he discovers the note to be a message directing Horton to ship 20,000 rounds of munitions the next day. The note contained the information that the yacht would be in waiting. Late that night, Lee steals into the Horton factory and a hasty examination reveals the fact that the malted milk cans really contain gunpowder. He is set upon by hired guards of Horton and beaten, locked and tied in the cage of an elevator. He finally makes his escape. The next morning, Lee, having notified the government officials that he is on the trail of one of the gang he has been on the lookout for, starts in pursuit of the yacht. No tug being available, he uses a hydroplane, leaps from that to a speedboat and just as a United States torpedo boat destroyer comes up and takes a hand in the case, overhauls the yacht in a powerful speedboat. The undoing of Horton is complete and the girl; of course, she marries the real man she has chanced upon so accidentally.