The Girl from Sunset Ranch: or, Alone in a Great City

He shot such an ugly look at her that Helen was again startled.

“What do you mean?” she returned, hiding her real emotion. “I have come to ask some questions. Why shouldn’t I?”

“You say Prince Morrell is dead?”

“Yes, sir. Nearly two months, now.”

“Who sent you, then?”

“Sent me to you?” queried Helen, in wonder.

“Yes. Somebody must have sent you,” said Mr. Grimes, watching her with his little eyes, in which there seemed to burn a very baleful look.

“You are mistaken. Nobody sent me,” said Helen, recovering a measure of her courage. She believed that this strange man was a coward. But why should he be afraid of her?

“You came clear across this continent to interview me about – about something that is gone and forgotten – almost before you were born?”

“It isn’t forgotten,” returned Helen, meaningly. “Such things are never forgotten. My father said so.”

“But it’s no use hauling everything to the surface of the pool again,” grumbled Mr. Grimes.

“That is about what Uncle Starkweather says; but I do not feel that way,” said Helen, slowly.

“Ha! Starkweather! Of course he’s in it. I might have known,” muttered the old man. “So he sent you to me?”

“No, sir. He objected to my coming,” declared Helen, quite convinced now that she should not deliver her uncle’s letter.

“The Starkweathers are the people you came East to visit?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how did they receive you in their fine Madison Avenue mansion?” queried Mr. Grimes, looking up at her slily again.

“Just as you know they did,” returned Helen, briefly.

“Ha! How’s that? And you with all that – ”

He halted and – for a moment – had the grace to blush. He saw that she read his mind.

“They do not know that I have some money for emergencies,” said Helen, coolly.

“Ho, ho!” chuckled Mr. Grimes, suddenly.

“So they consider you a pauper relative from the West?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ho, ho!” he laughed again, and rubbed his hands. “How did Prince leave you fixed?”

“I – I have something beside the money you saw me counting,” she told him, bluntly.

“And Willets Starkweather doesn’t know it?”

“He has never asked me if I were in funds.”

“I bet you!” cackled Grimes, at last giving way to a spasm of mirth which, Helen thought, was not nice to look upon. “And how does he fancy having you in his family?”

“He does not like it. Neither do his daughters. And one of their reasons is because people will ask questions about Prince Morrell’s daughter. They are afraid their friends will bring up father’s old trouble,” continued Helen, her voice quivering. “So that is why, Mr. Grime’s, I am determined to know the truth about it.”

“The truth? What do you mean?” snarled Grimes, suddenly starting out of his chair.

“Why, sir,” said Helen, amazed, “dad told me all about it when he was dying. All he knew. But he said by this time surely the truth of the matter must have come to light. I want to clear his name – ”

“How are you going to do that?” demanded Mr. Grimes.

“I hope you will help me – if you can, sir,” she said, pleadingly.

“How can I help more now than I could at the time he was charged with the crime?”

“I do not know. Perhaps you can’t. Perhaps Uncle Starkweather cannot, either. But, it seems to me, if anything had been heard from that bookkeeper – ”

“Allen Chesterton?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well! I don’t know how you are going to prove it, but I have always believed Allen was guilty,” declared Mr. Grimes, nodding his head vigorously, and still watching her face.

“Oh, have you, Mr. Grimes?” cried the girl, eagerly, clasping her hands. “You have always believed it?”

“Quite so. Evidence was against my old partner – yes. But it wasn’t very direct. And then – what became of Allen? Why did he run away?”

“That is what other people said about father,” said Helen, doubtfully. “It did not make him guilty, but it made him look guilty. The same can be said of the bookkeeper.”

“But how can you go farther than that?” asked Mr. Grimes. “It’s too long ago for the facts to be brought out. We can have our suspicions. We might even publish our suspicions. Let us get something in the papers – I can do it,” and he nodded, decisively, “stating that facts recently brought to light seemed to prove conclusively that Prince Morrell, once accused of embezzlement of the bank accounts of the firm of Grimes & Morrell, was guiltless of that crime. And we will state that the surviving partner of the firm is convinced that the only person guilty of that embezzlement was one Allen Chesterton, who was the firm’s bookkeeper. How about that? Wouldn’t that fill the bill?” asked Mr. Grimes, rubbing his hands together.

“If we had such an article published in the papers and circulated among his old friends, wouldn’t that satisfy you, my dear? Then you would do no more of this foolish probing for facts that cannot possibly be reached – eh? What do you say, Helen Morrell? Isn’t that a famous idea?”

But the girl from Sunset Ranch was, for the moment, speechless. For a second time, it seemed to her, she was being bribed to make no serious investigation of the evidence connected with her father’s old trouble. Both Uncle Starkweather and this old man seemed to desire to head her off!

CHAPTER XIX

“JONES”

“Isn’t that a famous idea?” demanded Mr. Grimes, for the second time.

“I – I am not so sure, sir,” Helen stammered.

“Why, of course it is!” he cried, smiting the desk before him with the flat of his palm. “Don’t you see that your father’s name will be cleared of all doubt? And quite right, too! He never was guilty.”

“It makes me quite happy to hear you say so,” said the girl, wiping her eyes. “But how about the bookkeeper?”

“Who – Allen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, we couldn’t find him now. If he kept hidden then, when there was a hue and cry out for him, what chance would there be of finding him after seventeen years? Oh, no! Allen can’t be found. And, even if he could, I doubt but the thing is outlawed. I don’t know that the authorities would take it up. And I am pretty sure the creditors of the old firm would not.”

“That is not what I mean,” said Helen, softly. “But suppose we accuse this bookkeeper —and he is not guilty, either?”

“Well! Is that any great odds? Nobody knows where he is – ”

“But suppose he should reappear,” persisted Helen. “Suppose somebody who loved him – a daughter, perhaps, as I am the daughter of Prince Morrell – with just as great a desire to clear her father’s name as I have to clear mine – Suppose such a person should appear determined to prove Mr. Chesterton not guilty, too?”

“Ha, but we’ve beat ’em to it – don’t you see?” demanded Mr. Grimes, heartlessly.

“Oh, sir! I could not take such an apparent victory at such a cost!” cried Helen, wiping her eyes again. “You say you believe Allen Chesterton was guilty instead of father. But you put forward no evidence – no more than the mere suspicion that cursed poor dad. No, no, sir! To claim new evidence, but to show no new evidence, is not enough. I must find out for sure just who stole that money. That is what dad himself said would be the only way in which his name could be cleared.”

“Nonsense, girl!” ejaculated Fenwick Grimes, scowling again.

“I am sorry to go against both your wishes and Uncle Starkweather’s,” said Helen, slowly. “But I want the truth! I can’t be satisfied with anything but the truth about this whole unfortunate business.

“It made poor dad very unhappy when he was dying. It troubled my poor mother – so he said – all her life out there in Montana. I want to know where the money went – who got it – all about it. Then I can prove to people that it was not my father who committed the crime.”

“This is a very quixotic thing you have undertaken, my girl,” remarked Mr. Grimes, with a sudden change in his manner.

“I hope not. I hope I shall learn the truth.”

“How?”

He shot the question at her as from a gun. His face had grown very grim and his sly little eyes gleamed threateningly. More than ever did Helen dislike and fear this man. The avaricious light in his eyes as he noted the money she carried on the train, had first warned her against him. Now, when she knew so much more about him, and how he was immediately connected with her father’s old trouble, Helen feared him all the more.

Because of his love of money alone, she could not trust him. And he had suggested something which was, upon the face of it, dishonest and unfair. She rose from her seat and shook her head slowly.

“I do not know how,” Helen said, sadly. “But I hope something may turn up to help me. I understand that you have never known anything about Allen Chesterton since he ran away?”

“Not a thing,” declared Mr. Grimes, shortly, rising as well.

“It is through him I hoped to find the truth,” she murmured.

“So you won’t accept my help?” growled Mr. Grimes.

“Not – not the kind you offer. It – it wouldn’t be right,” Helen replied.

“Very well, then!” snapped the man, and opened the door into the outer office. As he ushered her into the other room the outer door opened and a shabby man poked his head and shoulders in at the door.

“I say!” he said, quaveringly. “Is Mr. Grimes – ”

“Get out of here, you old ruffian!” cried Fenwick Grimes, flying into a sudden passion. “Of course, you’d got to come around to-day!”

“I only wanted to say, Mr. Grimes – ”

“Out of my sight!” roared Grimes. “Here, Leggett!” to his clerk; “give Jones a dollar and let him go. I can’t see him now.”

“Jones, sir?” queried the clerk, seemingly somewhat staggered, and looking from his employer to the old scarecrow in the doorway.

“Yes, sir!” snarled Mr. Grimes. “I said Jones, sir – Jones, Jones, Jones! Do you understand plain English, Mr. Leggett? Take that dollar on the desk and give it into the hands of Jones there at the door. And then oblige me by kicking him down the steps if he doesn’t move fast enough.”

Leggett moved rapidly himself after this. He seemed to catch his employer’s real meaning, and he grabbed the dollar and chased the beggar out into the hall. Grimes, meanwhile, held Helen back a bit. But he had nothing of any consequence to say.

Finally she bade him good-morning and went out of the office. She had not given him Uncle Starkweather’s letter. Somehow, she thought it best not to do so. If she had been doubtful of the sincerity of her uncle when she broached the subject nearest her heart, she had been much more suspicious of Fenwick Grimes.

She walked composedly enough out of the building; but it was hard work to keep back the tears. It did seem such a great task for a mere girl to attempt! And nobody would help her. She had nobody in whom to confide – nobody with whom she might discuss the mystery.

And when she told herself this her mind naturally flashed to the only real friend she had made in New York – Sadie Goronsky. Helen had looked up a map of the city the evening before in her uncle’s library, and she had marked the streets intervening between this place where she had interviewed her father’s old partner, and Madison Street on the East Side.

She had ridden downtown to Washington Arch; so she felt equal to the walk across town and down the Bowery to the busy street where Sadie plied her peculiar trade.

She crossed the Square and went through West Broadway to Bleecker Street and turned east on that busy and interesting thoroughfare. Suddenly, right ahead of her, she beheld the shabby brown hat and wrinkled coat of the old man who had stuck his head in at the door of Mr. Grimes’s office, and so disturbed the equilibrium of that individual.

Here was “Jones.” At first Helen thought him to be under the influence of drink. Then she saw that the man’s erratic actions must be the result of some physical or mental disability.

The old man could not walk in a straight line; but he tacked from one side of the walk to the other, taking long “slants” across the walk, first touching the iron balustrade of a step on one hand, and then bringing up at a post on the edge of the curb.

He seemed to mutter all the time to himself, too; but what he said, or whether it was sense, or nonsense, Helen (although she walked near him) could not make out. She did not wish to offend the old man; yet he seemed so helpless and peculiar that for several blocks she trailed him (as he seemed to be going her way), fearing that he would get into some trouble.

At the busy crossings Helen was really worried. The man first started, then dodged back, scouted up and down the way, seemed undecided, looked all around as though for help, and then, at the very worst time, when the vehicles in the street were the most numerous, he darted across, escaping death and destruction half a dozen times between curb and curb.

But somehow the angel that directs the destinies of foolish people who cross busy city streets, shielded him from harm, and Helen finally lost him as he turned down one of the main stems of the town while she kept on into the heart of the East Side.

And to Helen Morrell, the very “heart of the East Side” was right in the Goronsky flat on Madison Street. She had been comparing that home at the same number on Madison Street with that her uncle’s house boasted on Madison Avenue, with the latter mansion. The Goronsky tenement was a home, for love and contentment dwelt there; the stately Starkweather dwelling housed too many warring factions to be a real home.

Helen came, at length, to Madison Street. She had timed her coming so as to reach Jacob Finkelstein’s shop just about the time Sadie would be going to dinner.

“Miss Helen! Ain’t I glad to see you?” cried Sadie. “Is there anything the matter with the dress, yet?”

“No, Miss Sadie. I was downtown and thought I would ask you to go to dinner with me. I went with you yesterday.”

“O-oo my! I don’t know,” said Sadie, shaking her head. “I bet you’d like to come home with me instead – no?”

“I would like to. But it would not be right for me to accept your hospitality and never return it,” said Helen.

“Chee! you must ’a’ had a legacy,” laughed Sadie.

“I – I have a little more money than I had yesterday,” admitted Helen, which was true, for she had taken some out of the wallet in the trunk before she left her uncle’s house.

“Well, when you swells feel like spendin’ there ain’t no stoppin’ youse, I suppose,” declared Sadie. “Do you wanter fly real high?”

“I guess we can afford a real nice dinner,” said Helen, smiling.

“Are you good for as high as thirty-fi’ cents apiece?” demanded Sadie.

“Yes.”

“Chee! Then I can take you to a stylish place where we can get a swell feed at noon, for that. It’s up on Grand Street. All the buyers and department store heads go there with the wholesale salesmen for lunch. Wait till I git me hat!” and away Sadie shot, up the tenement house stairs, so fast that her little feet, bound by the tight skirt she wore, seemed fairly to twinkle.

Helen had but a few moments to wait on the sidewalk; yet within that short time something happened to change the entire current of the day’s adventures. She heard some boys shouting from the direction of the Bowery; there was a crowd crossing the street diagonally; she watched it with some apprehension at first, for it came right along the sidewalk toward her.

“Hi, fellers! See de Lurcher! Here comes de Lurcher!” yelled one ribald youth, who leaped on the stoop to which Helen had retreated the better to see over the heads of the crowd at the person who was the core of it.

And then Helen, in no little amazement, saw that this individual was none other than the man whom she had seen driven out of Fenwick Grimes’s office. A gang of hoodlums surrounded him. They jeered at him, tore at his ragged clothes, hooted, and otherwise nagged the poor old fellow.

At every halt he made they pressed closer upon the “Lurcher.” It was easy to see why he had been given that name. He was probably an old inhabitant of the neighborhood, and his lurching from side to side of the walk had suggested the nickname to some local wit.

Just as he steered for the rail of the step on which Helen stood, half fearful, and reached it, Sadie Goronsky came bounding out of the house. Instantly she took a hand – and as usual a master hand – in the affair.

“What you doin’ to that old man, you Izzy Strefonifsky? And, Freddie Bloom, you stop or I’ll tell your mommer! Ike, let him alone, or I’ll make your ears tingle myself – I can do it, too!”

Sadie charged as she commanded. The hoodlums scattered – some laughing, some not so easily intimidated. But the old man was clinging to the rail and muttering over and over to himself:

“They got my dollar – they got my dollar.”

“What’s that?” cried Sadie, coming back after chasing the last of the boys off the block. “What’s the matter, Mr. Lurcher?”

“My dollar – they got my dollar,” muttered the old man.

“Oh, dear!” whispered Helen. “And perhaps it was all he had.”

“You can bet it was,” said Sadie, angrily. “The likes of him wouldn’t likely have two dollars all at once! I’d like to scalp those imps! That I would!”

The old man, paying little attention to the two girls, but still muttering about his loss, lurched away on his erratic course homeward.

“Chee!” said Sadie. “Ain’t that tough luck? He lives right around the corner, all alone. And he’s just as poor as he can be. I don’t know what his real name is. But the boys guy him sumpin’ fierce! Ain’t it mean?”

“It certainly is,” agreed Helen.

“Say!” said Sadie, abruptly, but looking at Helen with sheepish eye.

“Well, what?”

“Say, was yer honest goin’ to blow seventy cents for that feed I spoke of up on Grand Street?”

“Certainly. And I – ”

“And a dime to the waiter?”

“Of course.”

“That’s eighty cents,” ran on Sadie, glibly enough now. “And twenty would make a dollar. I’ll dig up the twenty cents to put with your eighty, and what d’ye say we run after old Lurcher an’ give him a dollar – say we found it, you know – and then go upstairs to my house for dinner? Mommer’s got a nice dinner, and she’d like to see you again fine!”

“I’ll do it!” cried Helen, pulling out her purse at once. “Here! Here’s a dollar bill. You run after him and give it to him. You can give me the twenty cents later.”

“Sure!” cried the Russian girl, and she was off around the corner in the wake of the Lurcher, with flying feet.

Helen waited for her friend to return, just inside the tenement house door. When Sadie reappeared, Helen hugged her tight and kissed her.

“You are a dear!” the Western girl cried. “I do love you, Sadie!”

“Aw, chee! That ain’t nothin’,” objected the East Side girl. “We poor folks has gotter help each other.”

So Helen would not spoil the little sacrifice by acknowledging to more money, and they climbed the stairs again to the Goronsky tenement. The girl from Sunset Ranch was glad – oh, so glad! – of this incident. Chilled as she had been by the selfishness in her uncle’s Madison Avenue mansion, she was glad to have her heart warmed down here among the poor of Madison Street.

CHAPTER XX

OUT OF STEP WITH THE TIMES

“No,” Sadie told Helen, afterward, “I am very sure that poor Lurcher man doesn’t drink. Some says he does; but you never notice it on him. It’s just his eyes.”

“His eyes?” queried Helen, wonderingly.

“Yes. He’s sort of blind. His eyelids keep fluttering all the time. He can’t control them. And, if you notice, he usually lifts up the lid of one eye with his finger before he makes one of his base-runs for the next post. Chee! I’d hate to be like that.”

“The poor old man! And can nothing be done for it?”

“Plenty, I reckon. But who’s goin’ to pay for it? Not him – he ain’t got it to pay. We all has our troubles down here, Helen.”

The girls had come down from the home of Sadie again, and Helen was preparing to leave her friend.

“Aren’t there places to go in the city to have one’s eyes examined? Free hospitals, I mean?”

“Sure! And they got Lurcher to one, once. But all they give him was a prescription for glasses, and it would cost a lot to get ’em. So it didn’t do him no good.”

Helen looked at Sadie suddenly. “How much would it take for the glasses?” she asked.

“I dunno. Ten dollars, mebbe.”

“And do you s’pose he could have that prescription now?” asked Helen, eagerly.

“Mebbe. But why for?”

“Perhaps I could – could get somebody uptown interested in his case who is able to pay for the spectacles.”

“Chee, that would be bully!” cried Sadie.

“Will you find out about the prescription?”

“Sure I will,” declared Sadie. “Nex’ time you come down here, Helen, I’ll know all about it. And if you can get one of them rich ladies up there to pay for ’em – Well! it would beat goin’ to a swell restaurant for a feed – eh?” and she laughed, hugged the Western girl, and then darted across the sidewalk to intercept a possible customer who was loitering past the row of garments displayed in front of the Finkelstein shop.

But Helen did not get downtown again as soon as she expected. When she awoke the next morning there had set in a steady drizzle – cold and raw – and the panes of her windows were so murky that she could not see even the chimneys and roofs, or down into the barren little yards.

This – nor a much heavier – rain would not have ordinarily balked Helen. She was used to being out in all winds and weathers. But she actually had nothing fit to wear in the rain.

If she had worn the new cheap dress out of doors she knew what would happen. It would shrink all out of shape. And she had no raincoat, nor would she ask her cousins – so she told herself – for the loan of an umbrella.

So, as long as it rained steadily, it looked as though the girl from Sunset Ranch was a sure-enough “shut-in.” Nor did she contemplate this possibility with any pleasure.

There was nothing for her to do but read. And one cannot read all the time. She had no “fancy-work” with which to keep her hands and mind busy. She wondered what her cousins did on such days. She found out by keeping her ears and eyes open. After breakfast Belle went shopping in the limousine. There was an early luncheon and all three of the Starkweather girls went to a matinée. In neither case was Helen invited to go – no, indeed! She was treated as though she were not even in the house. Seldom did either of the older girls speak to her.

“I might as well be a ghost,” thought Helen.

And this reminded her of the little old lady who paced the ghost-walk every night – the ex-nurse, Mary Boyle. She had thought of going to see her on the top floor before; but she had not been able to pluck up the courage.

Now that her cousins were gone from the house, however, and Mrs. Olstrom was taking a nap in her room, and Mr. Lawdor was out of the way, and all the under-servants mildly celebrating the free afternoon below stairs, Helen determined to venture out of her own room, along the main passage of the top floor, to the door which she believed must give upon the front suite of rooms which the little old lady occupied.

She knocked, but there was no response. Nor could she hear any sound from within. It struck Helen that the principal cruelty of the Starkweathers’ treatment of this old soul was her being shut away alone up here at the top of the house – too far away from the rest of its occupants for a cry to be heard if the old lady should be in trouble.

“If they shut up a dog like this, he would howl and thus attract attention to his state,” muttered Helen. “But here is a human being – ”

She tried the door. The latch clicked and the door swung open. Helen stepped into a narrow, hall-like room, well furnished with old-fashioned furniture (probably brought from below stairs when Mr. Starkweather re-decorated the mansion) with one window in it. The door which evidently gave upon the remainder of the suite was closed.

As Helen listened, however, from behind this closed door came a cheerful, cracked voice – the same voice she had heard whispering the lullaby in the middle of the night. But now it was tuning up on an old-time ballad, very popular in its day:

“Wait till the clouds roll by, Jennie —Wait till the clouds roll by!Jennie, my own true loved one —Wait till the clouds roll by.”

“She doesn’t sound like a hopeless prisoner,” thought Helen, with surprise.