In the days before the great earthquake and fire of 1906, officials and politicians deemed San Francisco's Barbary Coast a moral cancer on their Paris of the Pacific, and back-alley vice and corruption were giving way to cable cars and European opera. Levi Hayes returns from San Quentin Prison ? after serving five years for the theft of $30,000 in gold coins from the San Francisco Mint ? with a plan to take back what is his and kill the now-powerful Healey brothers who set him up and had his barroom, House of Blazes, seized by court order.
To get back the House of Blazes, a property the Healeys plan to demolish, Levi recruits his nephew, Mack Lewis, telling him the gold coins wait hidden behind one of the cellar walls. Their wild scheme takes them through the rough streets, saloon halls, gambling dens, and houses of prostitution before the plan backfires. In lock-up as the earthquake hits, Levi and Mack must escape the collapsing building and burning city to get to the gold coins, but Quinn Healey is determined to get his own revenge on them.
