The story is laid in a Vermont community in 1933 in which six residents find themselves in some kind of a predicament because the government had declared a Bank Holiday to avoid run-on-the-bank situations happening across the country. By a curious turn-of-events ten $100 bills are put in an inn"s safe. Inkeeper Horace Taylor finds them and concludes they are payments from his debtors. He immediately pays off his own debts---only to be told later by his clerk, Uncle Ed, that the money belonged to a guest at the inn. Taylor begins a frantic effort to trace and regain the money, which is merrily circulating around the town from storekeeper J. J. Johnson to a landlady, Geraldine Atherton, to a lawyer, Tom O"Connor and his wife Audrey, to an artist, Waldo Williams and his fiancée Francie Taylor, the inn-keepers daughter. Plus, two rum-running bootleggers are conducting their own search for the bills. As Taylor trails the elusive money, the individual dramas of the various possessors are revealed.