The Girl from Sunset Ranch Part 15

She undressed slowly, shook out her garments, hung them properly to air, and stepped into the grateful bath. How good it felt after her long and tiresome journey by train!

But as she was drying herself on the fleecy towels she suddenly heard a sound outside her door. After the housekeeper left her the whole building had seemed as silent as a tomb. Now there was a steady rustling noise in the short corridor on which her room opened.

"What _did_ that woman ask me?" murmured Helen. "Was I afraid of ghosts?"

She laughed a little. To a healthy, normal, outdoor girl the supernatural had few terrors.

"It _is_ a funny sound," she admitted, hastily finished the drying process and then slipping into her nightrobe, kimono, and bed slippers.

All the time her ear seemed preternaturally attuned to that rising and waning sound without her chamber. It seemed to come toward the door, pa.s.s it, move lightly away, and then turn and repa.s.s again. It was a steady, regular----

_Step--put; step--put; step--put----_

And with it was the rustle of garments--or so it seemed. The girl grew momentarily more curious. The mystery of the strange sound certainly was puzzling.

"Who ever heard of a ghost with a wooden leg?" she thought, chuckling softly to herself. "And that is what it sounds like. No wonder the servants call this corridor 'the ghost walk.' Well, me for bed!"

She had already snapped out the electric light in the bathroom, and now hopped into bed, reaching up to pull the chain of the reading light as she did so. The top of one window was down half-way and the noise of the city at midnight reached her ear in a dull monotone.

Back here at the rear of the great mansion, street sounds were faint. In the distance, to the eastward, was the roar of a pa.s.sing elevated train.

An automobile horn hooted raucously.

But steadily, through all other sounds, as an accompaniment to them and to Helen Morrell's own thoughts, was the continuous rustle in the corridor outside her door:

_Step--put; step--put; step--put._

CHAPTER X

MORNING

The Starkweather mansion was a large dwelling. Built some years before the Civil War, it had been one of the "great houses" in its day, to be pointed out to the mid-nineteenth century visitor to the metropolis. Of course, when the sightseeing coaches came in fas.h.i.+on they went up Fifth Avenue and pa.s.sed by the stately mansions of the Victorian era, on Madison Avenue, without comment.

Willets Starkweather had sprung from a quite mean and un-noted branch of the family, and had never, until middle life, expected to live in the Madison Avenue homestead. The important members of his clan were dead and gone and their great fortunes scattered. Willets Starkweather could barely keep up with the expenditures of his great household.

There were never servants enough, and Mrs. Olstrom, the very capable housekeeper, who had served the present master's great-uncle before the day of the new generation, had hard work to satisfy the demands of those there were upon the means allowed her by Mr. Starkweather.

There were rooms in the house--especially upon the topmost floor--into which even the servants seldom went. There were vacant rooms which never knew broom nor duster. The dwelling, indeed, was altogether too large for the needs of Mr. Starkweather and his three motherless daughters.

But their living in it gave them a prestige which nothing else could. As wise as any match-making matron, Willets Starkweather knew that the family's address at this particular number on Madison Avenue would aid his daughters more in "making a good match" than anything else.

He could not dower them. Really, they needed no dower with their good looks, for they were all pretty. The Madison Avenue mansion gave them the open sesame into good society--choice society, in fact--and there some wealthy trio of unattached young men must see and fall in love with them.

And the girls understood this, too--right down to fourteen-year-old Flossie. They all three knew that to "pay poor papa" for reckless expenditures now, they must sooner or later capture moneyed husbands.

So, there was more than one reason why the three Starkweather girls leaped immediately from childhood into full-blown womanhood. Flossie had already privately studied the characters--and possible bank accounts--of the boys of her acquaintance, to decide upon whom she should smile her sweetest.

These facts--save that the mansion was enormous--were hidden from Helen when she arose on the first morning of her city experience. She had slept soundly and sweetly. Even the rustling steps on the ghost walk had not bothered her for long.

Used to being up and out by sunrise, she could not easily fall in with city ways. She hustled out of bed soon after daybreak, took a cold sponge, which made her body tingle delightfully, and got into her clothes as rapidly as any boy.

She had only the shoddy-looking brown traveling dress to wear, and the out-of-date hat. But she put them on, and ventured downstairs, intent upon going out for a walk before breakfast.

The solemn clock in the hall chimed seven as she found her way down the lower flight of front stairs. As she came through the curtain-hung halls and down the stairs, not a soul did she meet until she reached the front hall. There a rather decrepit-looking man, with a bleared eye, and dressed in decent black, hobbled out of a parlor to meet her.

"Bless me!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "What--what--what----"

"I am Helen Morrell," said the girl from Sunset Ranch, smiling, and judging that this must be the butler of whom the housekeeper had spoken the night before. "I have just come to visit my uncle and cousins."

"Bless me!" said the old man again. "Gregson told me. Proud to see you, Miss. But--you're dressed to go out, Miss?"

"For a walk, sir," replied Helen, nodding.

"At this hour? Bless me--bless me--bless me----"

He seemed apt to run off in this style, in an unending string of mild expletives. His head shook and his hands seemed palsied. But he was a polite old man.

"I beg of you, Miss, don't go out without a bit of breakfast. My own coffee is dripping in the percolator. Let me give you a cup," he said.

"Why--if it's not too much trouble, sir----"

"This way, Miss," he said, hurrying on before, and leading Helen to a cozy little room at the back. This corresponded with the housekeeper's sitting-room and Helen believed it must be Mr. Lawdor's own apartment.

He laid a small cloth with a flourish. He set forth a silver breakfast set. He did everything neatly and with an alacrity that surprised Helen in one so evidently decrepit.

"A chop, now, Miss? Or a rasher?" he asked, pointing to an array of electric appliances on the sideboard by which a breakfast might be "tossed up" in a hurry.

"No, no," Helen declared. "Not so early. This nice coffee and these delicious rolls are enough until I have earned more."

"Earned more, Miss?" he asked, in surprise.

"By exercise," she explained. "I am going to take a good tramp. Then I shall come back as hungry as a mountain lion."

"The family breakfasts at nine, Miss," said the butler, bowing. "But if you are an early riser you will always find something tidy here in my room, Miss. You are very welcome."

She thanked him and went out into the hall again. The footman in livery--very sleepy and tousled as yet--was unchaining the front door. A yawning maid was at work in one of the parlors with a duster. She stared at Helen in amazement, but Gregson stood stiffly at attention as the visitor went forth into the daylight.

"My, how funny city people live!" thought Helen Morrell. "I don't believe I ever could stand it. Up till all hours, and then no breakfast until nine. _What_ a way to live!

"And there must be twice as many servants as there are members of the family---- Why! more than that! And all that big house to get lost in,"

she added, glancing up at it as she started off upon her walk.

She turned the first corner and went through a side street toward the west. This was not a business side street. There were several tall apartment hotels interspersed with old houses.

She came to Fifth Avenue--"the most beautiful street in the world." It had been swept and garnished by a horde of white-robed men since two o'clock.

On this brisk October morning, from the Was.h.i.+ngton Arch to 110th Street, it was as clean as a whistle.