Archibald Cloyd was an ubergeek and as pedantic as it is possible to be. Hollywood hired him at thousands of dollars a week as the technical director on a movie about Napoleon. Wilson Page, Archibald's secretary, figured he didn't deserve anything better than being nursemaid to a strutting egomaniac. But when Archibald fell for a gangsters' moll and the gangster took exception to the relationship, and the pompous little geek proved too stuck up to backdown even when faced with torture, Wilson discovered he had developed affection for the pigmy popinjay, and swore to extract him from the situation.

When the movie company moved to Arizona to shoot desert scenes about Napoleon's Egyptian venture, he breathed a sigh of relief. But his relief didn't last long. In the desert Wilson discovered a complication he had never dreamed of when they encountered the Widow Hammer, an outsized woman with an outsized voice that could call the cattle home from a range beyond the mountains in a different state, who took a shine to Archibald because, as she said, "He talks beautiful. He don't always make sense a body can understand, but the sound of it is lovely."

Matters became even more complicated for Wilson when he fell for the irritating Miss Jemima Ward, a young woman who was used to running her own ranch, which she had inherited from her father, and looked down on soft men who earned their keep at soft jobs sitting in chairs, like secretaries to academic pedants—and looked even further down on young men who were not enlisted and off fighting in defense of their country against the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany. Just when it looked like things couldn't get more complicated, Wilson and Jemma discovered an old abandoned mine filled with a fortune in stolen rubber tires, one of the Homefront's least obtainable and most valuable commodities. And who did it belong to? The same hot-tempered gangster who had sworn to do the dirty to Archibald the first chance he got.