Bearded ex-convicts Richard Hatton and Chris Cotterill get work as printers, their prison vocation, at the Olwell Press. When owner Richard Olwell, who is about to divorce his wife and elope with his stenographer, Maggie Driver, discovers that they are ex-cons, he sends them away without pay. They go to Olwell's home and are fed dinner by Mrs. Olwell, when Olwell arrives intoxicated to get money for his elopement. He orders his wife out of the house and fights with Hatton and Cotterill. When Olwell dies after hitting his head on the fireplace, Hatton shaves and assumes Olwell's identity, saying that the dead man is Hatton and that Cotterill is his new foreman. Mrs. Olwell begins to love her "husband," and when Hatton tells her who he is, she switches her dead husband's fingerprint records with Hatton's at the police station, run by her cousin, to save Hatton from detection.