A gang of thieves lure a man out of his home so that they can rob it and threaten his wife and children. The family barricade themselves in an interior room, but the criminals are well-equipped for breaking in. When the father finds out what is happening, he must race against time to get back home.
It's Bob Allen's twenty-first birthday. His mother and his brother Jack, a policeman present him with a cap, personalized with his initals in the lining. Jack then goes to work and Bob goes out also. Later in the evening, Jack is called to the scene of a robbery, where he finds the cap with his brother's initials. Dismayed by the idea that his brother is a thief, he goes home and confronts Bob with the evidence. Though it breaks their mother's heart, Jack does his duty and leads his brother out in handcuffs.
At the Crossroads of Life is a typically Victorian-style melodrama in which a girl's wishes to be an actress are condemned by her stern father, a man of the cloth who has no time for those in the acting profession.
Fanny is the wife of Ben Webster, a trapper, and while he is an affectionate and dutiful husband, she yearns for something which appears better than her lot. She reasons: "Have I not youth and beauty and attainments far above this environment? Why should I be compelled to toil and struggle in this wilderness?"
Antonine, a worthless, good-for-nothing scoundrel, demands money of his cousin Galora, an energetic, provident husband and father. His demands are met with a positive rebuff, and when he becomes insistent be is forcibly ejected by Galora. As he leaves the tenement he vows to get even, and lies in wait until Galora has gone out on business. Climbing to the fifth floor, on which the Galoras live, he watches his chance, which comes when Mrs. Galora goes for an instant to visit a neighbor on the same floor. Darting into the apartment and raising the window he perceives the awful result of a drop to the ground, five stories below, and so evolves a plan that is dastardly in the extreme. Taking the infant child from the cradle, and placing it in a basket he lets it out with a short rope, the end of which he secures by letting the sash down on it, so that to raise the window would precipitate the baby to destruction.
A haughty politician, on seeing a satirical cartoon in a newspaper, rushes to the paper's offices to shoot the cartoonist. On discovering the cartoonist is a pretty woman, he falls instantly in love and wastes no time in trying to woo her.