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

“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!”

CHAPTER XIV

A NEW WORLD

The two girls stood on the sidewalk and let the tide of busy humanity flow by unnoticed. Both were healthy types of youth – one from the open ranges of the Great West, the other from a land far, far to the East.

Helen Morrell was brown, smiling, hopeful-looking; but she certainly was not “up to date” in dress and appearance. The black-eyed and black-haired Russian girl was just as well developed for her age and as rugged as she could be; but in her cheap way her frock was the “very latest thing,” her hair was dressed wonderfully, and the air of “city smartness” about her made the difference between her and Helen even more marked.

“I never s’posed you’d come down here,” said Sadie again.

“You asked was I turned out of my uncle’s house,” responded Helen, seriously. “Well, it does about amount to that.”

“Oh, no! Never!” cried the other girl.

“Let me tell you,” said Helen, whose heart was so full that she longed for a confidant. Besides, Sadie Goronsky would never know the Starkweather family and their friends, and she felt free to speak fully. So, without much reserve, she related her experiences in her uncle’s house.

“Now, ain’t they the mean things!” ejaculated Sadie, referring to the cousins. “And I suppose they’re awful rich?”

“I presume so. The house is very large,” declared Helen.

“And they’ve got loads and loads of dresses, too?” demanded the working girl.

“Oh, yes. They are very fashionably dressed,” Helen told her. “But see! I am going to have a new dress myself. Uncle Starkweather gave me ten dollars.”

“Chee!” ejaculated Sadie. “Wouldn’t it give him a cramp in his pocket-book to part with so much mazouma?”

“Mazouma?”

“That’s Hebrew for money,” laughed Sadie. “But you do need a dress. Where did you get that thing you’ve got on?”

“Out home,” replied Helen. “I see it isn’t very fashionable.”

“Say! we got through sellin’ them things to greenies two years back,” declared Sadie.

“You haven’t been at work all that time; have you?” gasped the girl from the ranch.

“Sure. I got my working papers four years ago. You see, I looked a lot older than I really was, and comin’ across from the old country all us children changed our ages, so’t we could go right to work when we come here without having to spend all day in school. We had an uncle what come over first, and he told us what to do.”

Helen listened to this with some wonder. She felt perfectly safe with Sadie, and would have trusted her, if it were necessary, with the money she had hidden away in her closet at Uncle Starkweather’s; yet the other girl looked upon the laws of the land to which she had come for freedom as merely harsh rules to be broken at one’s convenience.

“Of course,” said Sadie, “I didn’t work on the sidewalk here at first. I worked back in Old Yawcob’s shop – making changes in the garments for fussy customers. I was always quick with my needle.

“Then I helped the salesladies. But business was slack, and people went right by our door, and I jumped out one day and started to pull ’em in. And I was better at it —

“Good-day, ma’am! Will you look at a beautiful skirt – just the very latest style – we’ve only got a few of them for samples?” She broke off and left Helen to stand wondering while Sadie chaffered with another woman, who had hesitated a trifle as she passed the shop.

“Oh, no, ma’am! You was no greenie. I could tell that at once. That’s why I spoke English to you yet,” Sadie said, flattering the prospective buyer, and smiling at her pleasantly. “If you will just step in and see these skirts – or a two-piece suit if you will?”

Helen observed her new friend with amazement. Although she knew Sadie could be no older than herself, she used the tact of long business experience in handling the woman. And she got her into the store, too!

“I wash my hands of ’em when they get inside,” she said, laughing, and coming back to Helen. “If Old Yawcob and his wife and his salesladies can’t hold ’em, it isn’t my fault, you understand. I’m about the youngest puller-in there is along Madison Street – although that little hunchback in front of the millinery shop yonder looks younger.”

“But you don’t try to pull me in,” said Helen, laughing. “And I’ve got ten whole dollars to spend.”

“That’s right. But then, you see, you’re my friend, Miss,” said Sadie. “I want to be sure you get your money’s worth. So I’m going with you when you buy your dress – that is, if you’ll let me.”

“Let you? Why, I’d dearly love to have you advise me,” declared the Western girl. “And don’t —don’t– call me ‘Miss.’ I’m Helen Morrell, I tell you.”

“All right. If you say so. But, you know, you are from Madison Avenyer just the same.”

“No. I’m from a great big ranch out West.”

“That’s like a farm – yes? I gotter cousin that works on a farm over on Long Island. It’s a big farm – it’s eighty acres. Is that farm you come from as big as that?”

Helen nodded and did not smile at the girl’s ignorance. “Very much bigger than eighty acres,” she said. “You see, it has to be, for we raise cattle instead of vegetables.”

“Well, I guess I don’t know much about it,” admitted Sadie, frankly. “All I know is this city and mostly this part of it down here on the East Side. We all have to work so hard, you know. But we’re getting along better than we did at first, for more of us children can work.

“And now I want you should go home with me for dinner, Helen – yes! It is my dinner hour quick now; and then we will have time to pick you out a bargain for a dress. Sure! You’ll come?”

“If I won’t be imposing on you?” said Helen, slowly.

“Huh! That’s all right. We’ll have enough to eat this noon. And it ain’t so Jewish, either, for father don’t come home till night. Father’s awful religious; but I tell mommer she must be up-to-date and have some ’Merican style about her. I got her to leave off her wig yet. Catch me wearin’ a wig when I’m married just to make me look ugly. Not!”

All this rather puzzled Helen; but she was too polite to ask questions. She knew vaguely that Jewish people followed peculiar rabbinical laws and customs; but what they were she had no idea. However, she liked Sadie, and it mattered nothing to Helen what the East Side girl’s faith or bringing up had been. Sadie was kind, and friendly, and was really the only person in all this big city in whom the ranch girl could place the smallest confidence.

Sadie ran into the store for a moment and soon a big woman with an unctuous smile, a ruffled white apron about as big as a postage stamp, and her gray hair dressed as remarkably as Sadie’s own, came out upon the sidewalk to take the young girl’s place.

“Can’t I sell you somedings, lady?” she said to the waiting Helen.

“Now, don’t you go and run my customer in, Ma Finkelstein!” cried Sadie, running out and hugging the big woman. “Helen is my friend and she’s going home to eat mit me.”

“Ach! you are already a United Stater yet,” declared the big woman, laughing. “Undt the friends you have it from Number Five Av’noo – yes?”

“You guessed it pretty near right,” cried Sadie. “Helen lives on Madison Avenyer – and it ain’t Madison Avenyer uptown, neither!”

She slipped her hand in Helen’s and bore her off to the tenement house in which Helen had had her first adventure in the great city.

“Come on up,” said Sadie, hospitably. “You look tired, and I bet you walked clear down here?”

“Yes, I did,” admitted Helen.

“Some o’ mommer’s soup mit lentils will rest you, I bet. It ain’t far yet – only two flights.”

Helen followed her cheerfully. But she wondered if she was doing just right in letting this friendly girl believe that she was just as poor as the Starkweathers thought she was. Yet, on the other hand, wouldn’t Sadie Goronsky have felt embarrassed and have been afraid to be her friend, if she knew that Helen Morrell was a very, very wealthy girl and had at her command what would seem to the Russian girl “untold wealth”?

“I’ll pay her for this,” thought Helen, with the first feeling of real happiness she had experienced since leaving the ranch. “She shall never be sorry that she was kind to me.”

So she followed Sadie into the humble home of the latter on the third floor of the tenement with a smiling face and real warmth at her heart. In Yiddish the downtown girl explained rapidly her acquaintance with “the Gentile.” But, as she had told Helen, Sadie’s mother had begun to break away from some of the traditions of her people. She was fast becoming “a United Stater,” too.

She was a handsome, beaming woman, and she was as generous-hearted as Sadie herself. The rooms were a little steamy, for Mrs. Goronsky had been doing the family wash that morning. But the table was set neatly and the food that came on was well prepared and – to Helen – much more acceptable than the dainties she had been having at Uncle Starkweather’s.

The younger children, who appeared for the meal, were right from the street where they had been playing, or from work in neighboring factories, and were more than a little grimy. But they were not clamorous and they ate with due regard to “manners.”

“Ve haf nine, Mees,” said Mrs. Goronsky, proudly. “Undt they all are healt’y —ach! so healt’y. It takes mooch to feed them yet.”

“Don’t tell about it, Mommer” cried Sadie. “It aint stylish to have big fam’lies no more. Don’t I tell you?”

“What about that Preesident we hadt – that Teddy Sullivan – what said big fam’lies was a good d’ing? Aindt that enough? Sure, Sarah, a Preesident iss stylish.”

“Oh, Mommer!” screamed Sadie. “You gotcher politics mixed. ‘Sullivan’ is the district leader wot gifs popper a job; but ‘Teddy’ was the President yet. You ain’t never goin’ to be real American.”

But her mother only laughed. Indeed, the light-heartedness of these poor people was a revelation to Helen. She had supposed vaguely that very poor people must be all the time serious, if not actually in tears.

“Now, Helen, we’ll rush right back to the shop and I’ll make Old Yawcob sell you a bargain. She’s goin’ to get her new dress, Mommer. Ain’t that fine?”

“Sure it iss,” declared the good woman. “Undt you get her a bargain, Sarah.”

“Don’t call me ‘Sarah,’ Mommer!” cried the daughter. “It ain’t stylish, I tell you. Call me ‘Sadie.’”

Her mother kissed her on both plump cheeks. “What matters it, my little lamb?” she said, in their own tongue. “Mother love makes any name sweet.”

Helen did not, of course, understand these words; but the caress, the look on their faces, and the way Sadie returned her mother’s kiss made a great lump come into the orphan girl’s throat. She could hardly find her way in the dim hall to the stairway, she was so blinded by tears.

CHAPTER XV

“STEP – PUT; STEP – PUT”

An hour later Helen was dressed in a two-piece suit, cut in what a chorus of salesladies, including old Mrs. Finkelstein and Sadie herself, declared were most “stylish” lines – and it did not cost her ten dollars, either! Indeed, Sadie insisted upon going with her to a neighboring millinery store and purchasing a smart little hat for $1.59, which set off the new suit very nicely.

“Sure, this old hat and suit of yours is wort’ a lot more money, Helen,” declared the Russian girl. “But they ain’t just the style, yuh see. And style is everything to a girl. Why, nobody’d take you for a greenie now!”

Helen was quite wise enough to know that she had never been dressed so cheaply before; but she recognized, too, the truth of her friend’s statement.

“Now, you take the dress home, and the hat. Maybe you can find a cheap tailor who will make over the dress. There’s enough material in it. That’s an awful wide skirt, you know.”

“But I couldn’t walk in a skirt as narrow as the one you have on, Sadie.”

“Chee! if it was stylish,” confessed Sadie, “I’d find a way to walk in a piece of stove-pipe!” and she giggled.

So Helen left for uptown with her bundles, wearing her new suit and hat. She took a Fourth Avenue car and got out only a block from her uncle’s house. As she hurried through the side street and came to the Madison Avenue corner, she came face-to-face with Flossie, coming home from school with a pile of books under her arm.

Flossie looked quite startled when she saw her cousin. Her eyes grew wide and she swept the natty looking, if cheaply-dressed Western girl, with an appreciative glance.

“Goodness me! What fine feathers!” she cried. “You’ve been loading up with new clothes – eh? Say, I like that dress.”

“Better than the caliker one?” asked Helen, slily.

“You’re not so foolish as to believe I liked that,” returned Flossie, coolly. “I told Belle and Hortense that you weren’t as dense as they seemed to think you.”

“Thanks!” said Helen, drily.

“But that dress is just in the mode,” repeated Flossie, with some admiration.

“Your father’s kindness enabled me to get it,” said Helen, briefly.

“Humph!” said Flossie, frankly. “I guess it didn’t cost you much, then.”

Helen did not reply to this comment; but as she turned to go down to the basement door, Flossie caught her by the arm.

“Don’t you do that!” she exclaimed. “Belle can be pretty mean sometimes. You come in at the front door with me.”

“No,” said Helen, smiling. “You come in at the area door with me. It’s easier, anyway. There’s a maid just opening it.”

So the two girls entered the house together. They were late to lunch – indeed, Helen did not wish any; but she did not care to explain why she was not hungry.

“What’s the matter with you, Flossie?” demanded Hortense. “We’ve done eating, Belle and I. And if you wish your meals here, Helen, please get here on time for them.”

“You mind your own business!” cried Flossie, suddenly taking up the cudgels for her cousin as well as herself. “You aren’t the boss, Hortense! I got kept after school, anyway. And cook can make something hot for me and Helen.”

“You need to be kept after school – from the kind of English you use,” sniffed her sister.

“I don’t care! I hate the old studies!” declared Flossie, slamming her books down upon the table. “I don’t see why I have to go to school at all. I’m going to ask Pa to take me out. I need a rest.”

Which was very likely true, for Miss Flossie was out almost every night to some party, or to the theater, or at some place which kept her up very late. She had no time for study, and therefore was behind in all her classes. That day she had been censured for it at school – and when they took a girl to task for falling behind in studies at that school, she was very far behind, indeed!