When headstrong young Bab Archibald comes home from school for a vacation, her father—trying to teach his spendthrift daughter the value of money—makes a deal with her: he will deposit $1000 in her bank account, but that will be her allowance for the entire next year. Bab immediately buys a car, and almost as immediately crashes it through a fence and into a milk wagon. She gets arrested for speeding, and after she pays fines and damages, is left with a total bank account of 16 cents. She takes a job driving a cab in order to make money, and one day a customer leaves something in her cab—a floor plan of the Archibald mansion. Realizing that he must be a burglar, she sets a trap for him—but things don’t turn out quite the way she expected.