Sidekicks

After the Civil War, conman Quince Drew and his black friend Jason O'Rourke devise a scheme to swindle people. Quince claims that Jason is his slave and sells him to gullible buyers. Afterwards, Jason, who is a free man from Chicago, runs away and re-joins Quince at an arranged location. There they split the money and travel to another town ripe with suckers. However, the scam can only last so many times before the townsfolk smartens up to the con. Posses of outraged citizens search for them for a good hanging. After Quince and Jason narrowly avoid being caught by a posse, they are arrested in the wilderness at gunpoint by Prudy Jenkins, Sheriff Jenkins' daughter. Prudy is attractive but she also is tomboyish, stubborn and enthused about hanging outlaws. Sheriff Jenkins actually believes his daughter to be crazy in the head and therefore unable to rope herself a husband. Prudy arrests Quince and Jason on suspicion of being the vicious killers who recently robbed the stagecoach and killed 3 passengers. Since witnesses reported a white man and a black man as being the robbers, Quince and Jason are assumed to be the culprits. In town, however, Sheriff Jenkins laughs-off his daughter's claim to have captured the killers and points-out to the real culprits who the sheriff already captured and are languishing in his jail. Reluctantly, Prudy releases Quince and Jason who later get in an argument with a saloon drunk and are re-arrested by the sheriff for disturbing the peace. They end up in a neighboring jail-cell from the real stagecoach robbers who at some point start a fist-fight among themselves. Quince and Jason are watching the fight and make bets on the outcome, as spectators do when watching professional boxing matches. When the sheriff takes the robbers to the town courtroom for sentencing, he leaves his daughter in charge of the jail that now only holds Quince and Jason. During this time, a gang of outlaws comes to break the stagecoach robbers out of the sheriff's jail. Going only on rumors that one robber is white and the other is black, the gang assumes Quince and Jason are the men in question. They tie the sheriff's daughter to a chair and take Quince and Jason with them. Seeing a chance of escaping the sheriff's clutches, Quince and Jason play along with the gang. They meet the gang's boss, an idiot who is convinced of his genius as demonstrated by his successful criminal career. But the boss is a very suspicious man and it will prove difficult for Quince and Jason to gain his trust. They plan to pretend to join the gang for an upcoming bank robbery and actually capture the gang themselves for the posted rewards. The boss alone is worth $1500. Of course, things don't go as planned when the boss asks Quince and Jason to return to the sheriff's office and retrieve the sheriff's daughter as hostage for added leverage against the law, in case the bank robbery fails. Quince and Jason face a dilemma: if they don't play along, the gang will kill them and if they do, the law will hang them. Their solution will complicate things even further, as the smooth-talking Quince is already smitten with Prudy, the sheriff's daughter who laughingly rejected his previous advances. And to make matters worse, the other white-man-black-man duo escapes from the town jail on the eve of their hanging and robs the same town bank that Quince and Jason's gang is planning to hit in the morning.