Mr. Starkweather appeared to recover
his equanimity. He looked askance at his niece,
however, as she announced her intention.
“You are very young and very
foolish, Helen ahem! A mystery of sixteen
or seventeen years’ standing, which the best
detectives could not unravel, is scarcely a task to
be attempted by a mere girl.”
“Who else is there to do it?”
Helen demanded, quickly. “I mean to find
out the truth, if I can. I want you to tell me
all you know, and I want you to tell me how to find
Fenwick Grimes
“Nonsense, nonsense, girl!”
exclaimed her uncle, testily. “What good
would it do you to find Grimes?”
“He was the other partner in
the concern. He had just as good a chance to
steal the money as father.”
“Ridiculous! Mr. Grimes
was away from the city at the time.”
“Then you do remember
all about it, sir?” asked Helen, quickly.
“Ahem! That fact had
not slipped my mind,” replied her uncle, weakly.
“And then, there was Allen Chesterton,
the bookkeeper. Was a search ever made for him?”
“High and low,” returned
her uncle, promptly. “But nobody ever heard
of him thereafter.”
“And why did the shadow of suspicion
not fall upon him as strongly as it did upon my father?”
cried the girl, dropping, in her earnestness, her
assumed uncouthness of speech.
“Perhaps it did perhaps
it did,” muttered Mr. Starkweather. “Yes,
of course it did! They both ran away, you see
“Didn’t you advise dad
to go away until the matter could be cleared
up?” demanded Helen.
“Why I ahem!”
“Both you and Mr. Grimes advised
it,” went on the girl, quite firmly. “And
father did so because of the effect his arrest might
have upon mother in her delicate health. Wasn’t
that the way it was?”
“I I presume that is so,” agreed
Mr. Starkweather.
“And it was wrong,” declared
the girl, with all the confidence of youth. “Poor
dad realized it before he died. It made all the
firm’s creditors believe that he was guilty.
No matter what he did thereafter
“Stop, girl!” exclaimed
Mr. Starkweather. “Don’t you know
that if you stir up this old business the scandal
will all come to light? Why why, even
my name might be attached to it.”
“But poor dad suffered under
the blight of it all for more than sixteen years.”
“Ahem! It is a fact.
It was a great misfortune. Perhaps he was
advised wrongly,” said Mr. Starkweather, with
trembling lips. “But I want you to understand,
Helen, that if he had not left the city he would undoubtedly
have been in a cell when you were born.”
“I don’t know that that
would have killed me especially, if by staying
here, he might have come to trial and been freed of
suspicion.”
“But he could not be freed of suspicion.”
“Why not? I don’t
see that the evidence was conclusive,” declared
the girl, hotly. “At least, he knew
of none such. And I want to know now every bit
of evidence that could be brought against him.”
“Useless! Useless!” muttered her
uncle, wiping his brow.
“It is not useless. My
father was accused of a crime of which he wasn’t
guilty. Why, his friends here those
who knew him in the old days will think
me the daughter of a criminal!”
“But you are not likely to meet any of them
“Why not?” demanded Helen, quickly.
“Surely you do not expect to
remain here in New York long enough for that?”
said Uncle Starkweather, exasperated. “I
tell you, I cannot permit it.”
“I must learn what I can about
that old trouble before I go back if I go
back to Montana at all,” declared his niece,
doggedly.
Mr. Starkweather was silent for a
few moments. He had begun the discussion with
the settled intention of telling Helen that she must
return at once to the West. But he knew he had
no real right of control over the girl, and to claim
one would put him at the disadvantage, perhaps, of
being made to support her.
He saw she was a very determined creature,
young as she was. If he antagonized her too much,
she might, indeed, go out and get a position to support
herself and remain a continual thorn in the side of
the family.
So he took another tack. He was
not a successful merchant and real estate operator
for nothing. He said:
“I do not blame you, Helen,
for wishing that that old cloud over your father’s
name might be dissipated. I wish so, too.
But, remember, long ago your ahem! your
aunt and I, as well as Fenwick Grimes, endeavored to
get to the bottom of the mystery. Detectives
were hired. Everything possible was done.
And to no avail.”
She watched him narrowly, but said nothing.
“So, how can you be expected
to do now what was impossible when the matter was
fresh?” pursued her uncle, suavely. “If
I could help you
“You can,” declared the girl, suddenly.
“Will you tell me how?” he asked, in a
rather vexed tone.
“By telling me where to find Mr. Grimes,”
said Helen.
“Why er that
is easily done, although I have had no dealings with
Mr. Grimes for many years. But if he is at home he
travels over the country a great deal I
can give you a letter to him and he will see you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You are determined to try to rake up all this
trouble?”
“I will see Mr. Grimes. And I will try
to find Allen Chesterton.”
“Out of the question!”
cried her uncle. “Chesterton is dead.
He dropped out of sight long ago. A strange character
at best, I believe. And if he was the thief
“Well, sir?”
“He certainly would not help you convict himself.”
“Not intentionally, sir,” admitted Helen.
“I never did see such an opinionated
girl,” cried Mr. Starkweather, in sudden wrath.
“I’m sorry, sir, if I trouble you.
If you don’t want me here
Now, her uncle had decided that it
would not be safe to have the girl elsewhere in New
York. At least, if she was under his roof, he
could keep track of her activities. He began
to be a little afraid of this very determined, unruffled
young woman.
“She’s a little savage!
No knowing what she might do, after all,” he
thought.
Finally he said aloud: “Well,
Helen, I will do what I can. I will communicate
with Mr. Grimes and arrange for you to visit him soon.
I will tell you ahem! in the
near future, all I can recollect of the affair.
Will that satisfy you?”
“I will take it very kindly
of you, Uncle,” said Helen non-committally.
“And when you are satisfied
of the impossibility of your doing yourself, or your
father’s name, any good in this direction, I
shall expect you to close your visit in the East here
and return to your friends in Montana.”
She nodded, looking at him with a
strange expression on her shrewd face.
“You mean to help me as a sort
of a bribe,” she observed, slowly. “To
pay you I am to return home and never trouble you
any more?”
“Well er ahem!”
“Is that it, Uncle Starkweather?”
“You see, my dear,” he
began again, rather red in the face, but glad that
he was getting out of a bad corner so easily, “you
do not just fit in, here, with our family life.
You see it yourself, perhaps?”
“Perhaps I do, sir,” replied the girl
from Sunset Ranch.
“You would be quite at a disadvantage
beside my girls ahem! You would not
be happy here. And of course, you haven’t
a particle of claim upon us.”
“No, sir; not a particle,” repeated Helen.
“So you see, all things considered,
it would be much better for you to return to your
own people ahem own people,”
said Mr. Starkweather, with emphasis. “Now er you
are rather shabby, I fear, Helen. I am not as
rich a man as you may suppose. But I
The fact is, the girls are ashamed of your appearance,”
he pursued, without looking at her, and opening his
bill case.
“Here is ten dollars. I
understand that a young miss like you can be fitted
very nicely to a frock downtown for less than ten dollars.
I advise you to go out to-morrow and find yourself
a more up-to-date frock than than that
one you have on, for instance.
“Somebody might see you come
into the house ahem! some of
our friends, I mean, and they would not understand.
Get a new dress, Helen. While you are here look
your best. Ahem! We all must give the hostage
of a neat appearance to society.”
“Yes, sir,” said Helen, simply.
She took the money. Her throat
had contracted so that she could not thank him for
it in words. But she retained a humble, thankful
attitude, and it sufficed.
He cared nothing about hurting the
feelings of the girl. He did not even inquire in
his own mind if she had any feelings
to be hurt! He was so self-centred, so pompous,
so utterly selfish, that he never thought how he might
wrong other people.
Willets Starkweather was very tenacious
of his own dignity and his own rights. But for
the rights of others he cared not at all. And
there was not an iota of tenderness in his heart for
the orphan who had come so trustingly across the continent
and put herself in his charge. Indeed, aside
from a feeling of something like fear of Helen, he
betrayed no interest in her at all.
Helen went out of the room without
a further word. She was more subdued that evening
at dinner than she had been before. She did not
break out in rude speeches, nor talk very much.
But she was distinctly out of her element or
so her cousins thought at their dinner table.
“I tell you what it is, girls,”
Belle, the oldest cousin, said after the meal and
when Helen had gone up to her room without being invited
to join the family for the evening, “I tell
you what it is: If we chance to have company
to dinner while she remains, I shall send a tray up
to her room with her dinner on it. I certainly
could not bear to have the Van Ramsdens, or
the De Vornes, see her at our table.”
“Quite true,” agreed Hortense.
“We never could explain having such a cousin.”
“Horrors, no!” gasped Flossie.
Helen had found a book in the library,
and she lit the gas in her room (there was no electricity
on this upper floor) and forgot her troubles and unhappiness
in following the fortunes of the heroine of her story-book.
It was late when she heard the maids retire.
They slept in rooms opening out of a side hall.
By and by after the clock
in the Metropolitan tower had struck the hour of eleven Helen
heard the rustle and step outside her door which she
had heard in the corridor downstairs. She crept
to her door, after turning out her light, and opening
it a crack, listened.
Had somebody gone downstairs?
Was that a rustling dress in the corridor down there the
ghost walk? Did she hear again the “step put;
step put” that had puzzled her already?
She did not like to go out into the
hall and, perhaps, meet one of the servants.
So, after a time, she went back to her book.
But the incident had given her a distaste
for reading. She kept listening for the return
of the ghostly step. So she undressed and went
to bed. Long afterward (or so it seemed to her,
for she had been asleep and slept soundly) she was
aroused again by the “step put; step put”
past her door.
Half asleep as she was, she jumped
up and ran to the door. When she opened it, it
seemed as though the sound was far down the main corridor and
she thought she could see the entire length of that
passage. At least, there was a great window at
the far end, and the moonlight looked ghostily in.
No shadow crossed this band of light, and yet the rustle
and step continued after she reached her door and
opened it.
Then
Was that a door closed softly in the
distance? She could not be sure. After a
minute or two one thing she was sure of, however;
she was getting cold here in the draught, so she scurried
back to bed, covered her ears, and went to sleep again.
Helen got up the next morning with
one well-defined determination. She would put
into practice her uncle’s suggestion. She
would buy one of the cheap but showy dresses which
shopgirls and minor clerks had to buy to keep up appearances.
It was a very serious trouble to Helen
that she was not to buy and disport herself in pretty
frocks and hats. The desire to dress prettily
and tastefully is born in most girls just
as surely as is the desire to breathe. And Helen
was no exception.
She was obstinate, however, and could
keep to her purpose. Let the Starkweathers think
she was poor. Let them continue to think so until
her play was all over and she was ready to go home
again.
Her experience in the great city had
told Helen already that she could never be happy there.
She longed for the ranch, and for the Rose pony even
for Big Hen Billings and Sing and the rag-head, Jo-Rab,
and Manuel and Jose, and all the good-hearted, honest
“punchers” who loved her and who would
no more have hurt her feelings than they would have
made an infant cry.
She longed to have somebody call her
“Snuggy” and to smile upon her in good-fellowship.
As she walked the streets nobody appeared to heed her.
If they did, their expression of countenance merely
showed curiosity, or a scorn of her clothes.
She was alone. She had never
felt so much alone when miles from any other human
being, as she sometimes had been on the range.
What had Dud said about this? That one could
be very much alone in the big city? Dud was right.
She wished that she had Dud Stone’s
address. She surely would have communicated with
him now, for he was probably back in New York by this
time.
However, there was just one person
whom she had met in New York who seemed to the girl
from Sunset Ranch as being “all right.”
And when she made up her mind to do as her uncle had
directed about the new frock, it was of this person
Helen naturally thought.
Sadie Goronsky! The girl who
had shown herself so friendly the night Helen had
come to town. She worked in a store where they
sold ladies’ clothing. With no knowledge
of the cheaper department stores than those she had
seen on the avenue, it seemed quite the right thing
to Helen’s mind for her to search out Sadie
and her store.
So, after an early breakfast taken
in Mr. Lawdor’s little room, and under the ministrations
of that kind old man, Helen left the house by
the area door as requested and started
downtown.
She didn’t think of riding.
Indeed, she had no idea how far Madison Street was.
But she remembered the route the taxicab had taken
uptown that first evening, and she could not easily
lose her way.
And there was so much for the girl
from the ranch to see so much that was
new and curious to her that she did not
mind the walk; although it took her until almost noon,
and she was quite tired when she got to Chatham Square.
Here she timidly inquired of a policeman,
who kindly crossed the wide street with her and showed
her the way. On the southern side of Madison
Street she wandered, curiously alive to everything
about the district, and the people in it, that made
them both seem so strange to her.
“A dress, lady! A hat, lady!”
The buxom Jewish girls and women,
who paraded the street before the shops for which
they worked, would give her little peace. Yet
it was all done good-naturedly, and when she smiled
and shook her head they smiled, too, and let her pass.
Suddenly she saw the sturdy figure
of Sadie Goronsky right ahead. She had stopped
a rather over-dressed, loud-voiced woman with a child,
and Helen heard a good deal of the conversation while
she waited for Sadie (whose back was toward her) to
be free.
The “puller-in” and the
possible customer wrangled some few moments, both
in Yiddish and broken English; but Sadie finally carried
her point and the child into
the store! The woman had to follow her offspring,
and once inside some of the clerks got hold of her
and Sadie could come forth to lurk for another possible
customer.
“Well, see who’s here!”
exclaimed the Jewish girl, catching sight of Helen.
“What’s the matter, Miss? Did they
turn you out of your uncle’s house upon Madison
Avenyer? I never did expect to see you
again.”
“But I expected to see you again,
Sadie; I told you I’d come,” said Helen,
simply.
“So it wasn’t just a josh; eh?”
“I always keep my word,” said the girl
from the West.
“Chee!” gasped Sadie.
“We ain’t so partic’lar around here.
But I’m glad to see you, Miss, just the same.
Be-lieve me!”