In spring of 1938, a young Dum Dum Dugan bets his circus at the tables of the Mississippi Queen and loses to the house, leading to a brawl between him and thugs working for Spencer Keene, who had been trying to buy the circus from him. Dominic Fortune helps quell the fight in exchange for Sabbath forgiving his debts. When he hears Dugan's story, he opts to help get the circus back, and when Sabbath meets Keene and finds out what a creep he is, she agrees to go along with it and soon Dominic is lending his acrobatic talents to the circus to help Dugan earn the money needed to buy it back for himself.

Keene, who only really wanted the circus so he could use the Amazing Cephallo's psychic abilities to help crack the booby-trapped safe his father left him, instead schemes to create a distraction at the circus and kidnap Cephallo. He ends up with Cephallo's assistant Glory, but his disappointment turns when he realizes Glory had the real psychic powers of the team. However, just as she opens the safe for him, Dominic and Dum Dum catch up and Dugan throws the safe into the water before its trap explodes. Dominic then catches the fleeing Keene. Later, a movie producer who saw the action pays Sabbath a fee to hire Glory, which Sabbath accepts as Dugan's debt, so she turns the circus back over to him.

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