Judge Foster throws his daughter out because she married a circus man. She leaves her baby girl with Prof. McGargle before she dies. Years later Sally is a dancer with whom Peyton, a son of Judge Foster's friend, falls in love. When Sally is arrested McGargle proves her real parentage.

Sally is in the care of sideshow faker Eustace McGargle, who loves her dearly but isn't above training her to dance and perform as a warm-up for his own act, which includes juggling and other feats of legerdemain. McGargle moves to Green Meadows, where a new carnival job offers the likelihood of a possible reunion with Sally's grandparents Foster, and the two hire on for the afternoon with a local baker, promising to mind his kiln in return for a stake with which to purchase a bit of respectability to take with them to the Foster home. Sally soon meets Peyton Lennox, scion of a leading social clan, and though she is favored by the wistful and daughterless Mrs. Foster, she is jailed by insidious society leverage and accused of the shell game which her mentor, McGargle, has developed into a highly sophisticated con. McGargle falls in with bootleggers but returns in time to prevent Sally's sentencing by the austere judge, who is informed that he very nearly sent his own granddaughter up the river. The Fosters also take the gregarious McGargle under their wing.