The Girl from Sunset Ranch Part 22

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 att.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sage. 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.