Prison guards Henderson and Killian, looking for some easy money, plot to secretly spring convicts Jones and Williams whom they have talked up to the Press as very dangerous, and promptly recapture the pair for the reward. Prisoners Carson and Dees who really want to escape are persuaded to forcibly take the drugged Jones and Williams out with them as the price for being allowed to escape themselves. The guards' plan is that the four cons will then to be held at a mountain cabin by hired "minders" until the guards arrive to take the four cons back in. But Jones and Williams really do escape, take the car of the minders, and head off to try to get back inside the prison where they will insist they never willingly left. Carson and Dees are initially left handcuffed to beds in the cabin where the minders took them all. Henderson and Killian search frantically for the escapees to try to still make this work while Jones and Williams are forced to desperate measures to try to get back inside the prison. Carson and Dees finally also get free but after a miserable night in the woods they catch a ride back incognito to the jail with some volunteer searching for them. There an alert inmate slips them back inside to join Jones and Williams and no one can prove any of them were ever off the premises. That inmate now tells the state authorities that the cost of keeping what happened quiet is for the five inmates to be released with a promise never to tell.