CHAPTER XVIIA DISTINCT SHOCK
That evening when Mr. Starkweather came home, he handed Helen a sealed letter.
“I have ascertained,” the gentleman said, in his most pompous way, “that Mr. Fenwick Grimes is in town. He has recently returned from a tour of the West, where he has several mining interests. You will find his address on that envelope. Give the letter to him. It will serve to introduce you.”
He watched her closely while he said this, but did not appear to do so. Helen thanked him with some warmth.
“This is very good of you, Uncle Starkweather—especially when I know you do not approve.”
“Ahem! Sleeping dogs are much better left alone. To stir a puddle is only to agitate the mud. This old business would much better be forgotten. You know all that there is to be known about the unfortunate affair, I am quite sure.”
“I cannot believe that, Uncle,” Helen replied. “Had you seen how my dear father worried about it when he was dying——”
Mr. Starkweather could look at her no longer—not even askance. He shook his head and murmured some commonplace, sympathetic phrase. But it did not seem genuine to his niece.
She knew very well that Mr. Starkweather had no real sympathy for her; nor did he care a particle about her father’s death. But she tucked the letter into her pocket and went her way.
As she passed through the upstairs corridor Flossie was entering one of the drawing-rooms, and she caught her cousin by the hand. Flossie had been distinctly nicer to Helen—in private—since the latter had helped her with the algebra problems.
“Come on in, Helen. Belle’s just pouring tea. Don’t you want some?” said the youngest Starkweather girl.
It was in Helen’s mind to excuse herself. Yet she was naturally too kindly to refuse to accept an advance like this. And she, like Flossie, had no idea that there was anybody in the drawing-room save Belle and Hortense.
In they marched—and there were three young ladies—friends of Belle—sipping tea and eating macaroons by the log fire, for the evening was drawing in cold.
“Goodness me!” ejaculated Belle.
“Well, I never!” gasped Hortense. “Haveyougot to butt in, Floss?”
“We want some tea, too,” said the younger girl, boldly, angered by her sisters’ manner.
“You’d better have it in the nursery,” yawned Hortense. “This is no place for kids in the bread-and-butter stage of growth.”
“Oh, is that so?” cried Flossie. “Helen and I are not kids—distinctlynot! I hope I know my way about a bit—and as for Helen,” she added, with a wicked grin, knowing that the speech would annoy her sisters, “Helen can shoot, and rope steers, and break ponies to saddle, and all that. She told me so the other evening. Isn’t that right, Cousin Helen?”
“Why, your cousin must be quite a wonderful girl,” said Miss Van Ramsden, one of the visitors, to Flossie. “Introduce me; won’t you, Flossie?”
Belle was furious; and Hortense would have been, too, only she was too languid to feel such an emotion. Flossie proceeded to introduce Helen to the three visitors—all of whom chanced to be young ladies whom Belle was striving her best to cultivate.
And before Flossie and Helen had swallowed their tea, which Belle gave them ungraciously, Gregson announced a bevy of other girls, untilquite a dozen gaily dressed and chattering misses were gathered before the fire.
At first Helen had merely bowed to the girls to whom she was introduced. She had meant to drink her tea quietly and excuse herself. She did not wish now to display a rude manner before Belle’s guests; but her oldest cousin seemed determined to rouse animosity in her soul.
“Yes,” she said, “Helen is paying us a little visit—a very brief one. She is not at all used to our ways. In fact, Indian squaws and what-do-you call-’ems—Greasers—are about all the people she sees out her way.”
“Is that so?” cried Miss Van Ramsden. “It must be a perfectly charming country. Come and sit down by me, Miss Morrell, and tell me about it.”
Indeed, at the moment, there was only one vacant chair handy, and that was beside Miss Van Ramsden. So Helen took it and immediately the young lady began to ask questions about Montana and the life Helen had lived there.
Really, the young society woman was not offensive; the questions were kindly meant. But Helen saw that Belle was furious and she began to take a wicked delight in expatiating upon her home and her own outdoor accomplishments.
When she told Miss Van Ramsden how she andher cowboy friends rode after jack-rabbits and roped them—if they could!—and shot antelope from the saddle, and that the boys sometimes attacked a mountain lion with nothing but their lariats, Miss Van Ramsden burst out with:
“Why, that’s perfectly grand! What fun you must have! Do hear her, girls! Why, what we do is tame and insipid beside things that happen out there in Montana every day.”
“Oh, don’t bother about her, May!” cried Belle. “Come on and let’s plan what we’ll do Saturday if we go to the Nassau links.”
“Listen here!” cried Miss Van Ramsden, eagerly. “Golf can wait. We can always golf. But your cousin tells the very bulliest stories. Go on, Miss Morrell. Tell some more.”
“Do, do!” begged some of the other girls, drawing their chairs nearer.
Helen was not a little embarrassed. She would have been glad to withdraw from the party. But then she saw the looks exchanged between Belle and Hortense, and they fathered a wicked desire in the Western girl’s heart to give her proud cousins just what they were looking for.
She began, almost unconsciously, to stretch her legs out in a mannish style, and drop into the drawl of the range.
“Coyote running is about as good fun as wehave,” she told Miss Van Ramsden in answer to a question. “Yes, they’re cowardly critters; but they can run like a streak o’ greased lightning—yes-sir-ree-bob!” Then she began to laugh a little. “I remember once when I was a kid, that I got fooled about coyotes.”
“I’d like to know what you are now,” drawled Hortense, trying to draw attention from her cousin, who was becoming altogether too popular. “And you should know that children are better seen than heard.”
“Let’s see,” said Helen, quickly, “our birthdays are in the same month; aren’t they, ’Tense? I believe mother used to tell me so.”
“Oh, never mind your birthdays,” urged Miss Van Ramsden, while some of the other girls smiled at the repartee. “Let’s hear about your adventure with the coyote, Miss Morrell.”
“Why, ye see,” said Helen, “it wasn’t much. I was just a kid, as I say—mebbe ten year old. Dad had given me a light rifle—just a twenty-two, you know—to learn to shoot with. And Big Hen Billings——”
“Doesn’t that sound just like those dear Western plays?” gasped one young lady. “You know—‘The Squaw Man of the Golden West,’ or ‘Missouri,’ or——”
“Hold on! You’re getting your titles mixed,Lettie,” cried Miss Van Ramsden. “Do let Miss Morrell tell it.”
“To give that child the center of the stage!” snapped Hortense, to Belle.
“I could shake Flossie for bringing her in here,” returned the oldest Starkweather girl, quite as angrily.
“Tell us about your friend, Big Hen Billings,” drawled another visitor. “Hedoessound so romantic!”
Helen almost giggled. To consider the giant foreman of Sunset Ranch a romantic type was certainly “going some.” She had the wicked thought that she would have given a large sum of money, right then and there, to have had Big Hen announced by Gregson and ushered into the presence of this group of city girls.
“Well,” continued Helen, thus urged, “father had given me a little rifle and Big Hen gave me a maverick——”
“What’s that?” demanded Flossie.
“Well, in this case,” explained Helen, “it was an orphaned calf. Sometimes they’re strays that haven’t been branded. But in this case a bear had killed the calf’s mother in acoulée. She had tried to fight Mr. Bear, of course, or he never would have killed her at that time of year. Bears aren’t dangerous unless they’re hungry.”
“My! but they look dangerous enough—at the zoo,” observed Flossie.
“I tell ye,” said Helen, reflectively, “that was a pretty calf. And I was little, and I hated to hear them blat when the boys burned them——”
“Burned them! Burned little calves! How cruel! What for?”
These were some of the excited comments. And in spite of Belle and Hortense, most of the visitors were now interested in the Western girl’s narration.
“They have to brand ’em, you see,” explained Helen. “Otherwise we never could pick our cattle out from other herds at the round-up. You see, on the ranges—even the fenced ranges—cattle from several ranches often get mixed up. Our brand is the Link-A. Our ranch was known, in the old days, as the ‘Link-A.’ It’s only late years that we got to calling it Sunset Ranch.”
“Sunset Ranch!” cried Miss Van Ramsden, quickly. “Haven’t I heard something aboutthatranch? Isn’t it one of the big, big cattle and horse-breeding ranches?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Helen, slowly, fearing that she had unwittingly got into a blind alley of conversation.
“And your father ownsthatranch?” cried Miss Van Ramsden.
“My—my father is dead,” said Helen. “I am an orphan.”
“Oh, dear me! I am so sorry,” murmured the wealthy young lady.
But here Belle broke in, rather scornfully:
“The child means that her father worked on that ranch. She has lived there all her life. Quite a rude place, I fawncy.”
Helen’s eyes snapped. “Yes. He worked there,” she admitted, which was true enough, for nobody could honestly have called Prince Morrell a sluggard.
“He was—what you call it—a cowpuncher, I believe,” whispered Belle, in an aside.
If Helen heard she made no sign, but went on with her story.
“You see, it wassucha pretty calf,” she repeated. “It had big blue eyes at first—calves often do. And it was all sleek and brown, and it played so cunning. Of course, its mother being dead, I had a lot of trouble with it at first. I brought it up by hand.
“And I tied a broad pink ribbon around its neck, with a big bow at the back. When it slipped around under its neck Bozie would somehow get the end of the ribbon in its mouth, and chew, and chew on it till it was nothing but pulp.”
She laughed reminiscently, and the others, watching her pretty face in the firelight, smiled too.
“So you called it Bozie?” asked Miss Van Ramsden.
“Yes. And it followed me everywhere. If I went out to try and shoot plover or whistlers with my little rifle, there was Bozie tagging after me. So, you see when it came calf-branding time, I hid Bozie.”
“You hid it? How?” demanded Flossie. “Seems to me a calf would be a big thing to hide.”
“I didn’t hide it under my bed,” laughed Helen. “No, sir! I took it out to a far distantcouléewhere I used to go to play—a long way from the bunk-house—and I hitched Bozie to a stub of a tree where there was nice, short, sweet grass for him.
“I hitched him in the morning, for the branding fires were going to be built right after dinner. But I had to show up at dinner—sure. The whole gang would have been out hunting me if I didn’t report for meals.”
“Yes. I presume you ran perfectly wild,” sighed Hortense, trying to look as though she were sorry for this half-savage little cousin from the “wild and woolly.”
“Oh, very wild indeed,” drawled Helen. “And after dinner I raced back to thecouléeto see that Bozie was all right. I took my rifle along so the boys would think I’d gone hunting and wouldn’t tell father.
“I’d heard coyotes barking, as I thought, all the forenoon. And when I came to the hollow, there was Bozie running around and around his stub, and getting all tangled up, blatting his heart out, while two big old coyotes (or so I thought they were) circled around him.
“They ran a little way when they saw me coming. Coyotes sometimeswillkill calves. But I had never seen one before that wouldn’t hunt the tall pines when they saw me coming.
“Crackey, those two were big fellers! I’d seen big coyotes, but never none like them two gray fellers. And they snarled at me when I made out to chase ’em—me wavin’ my arms and hollerin’ like a Piute buck. I never had seen coyotes like them before, and it throwed a scare into me—it sure did!
“And Bozie was so scared that he helped to scare me. I dropped my gun and started to untangle him. And when I got him loose he acted like all possessed!
“LET’S HEAR ABOUT YOUR ADVENTURE WITH THE COYOTE, MISS MORRELL.”(Page 180.)
“LET’S HEAR ABOUT YOUR ADVENTURE WITH THE COYOTE, MISS MORRELL.”(Page 180.)
“He wanted to run wild,” proceeded Helen. “He yanked me over the ground at a great rate. And all the time those two gray fellers was sneakin’ up behind me. Crackey, but I got scared!
“A calf is awful strong—’specially when it’s scared. You don’t know! I had to leave go of either the rope, or the gun, and somehow,” and Helen smiled suddenly into Miss Van Ramsden’s face—who understood—“somehow I felt like I’d better hang onter the gun.”
“They weren’t coyotes!” exclaimed Miss Van Ramsden.
“No. They was wolves—real old, gray, timber-wolves. We hadn’t been bothered by them for years. Two of ’em, working together, would pull down a full-grown cow, let alone a little bit of a calf and a little bit of a gal,” said Helen.
“O-o-o!” squealed the excited Flossie. “But they didn’t?”
“I’m here to tell the tale,” returned her cousin, laughing outright. “Bozie broke away from me, and the wolves leaped after him—full chase. I knelt right down——”
“And prayed!” gasped Flossie. “I should think you would!”
“Ididpray—yes, ma’am! I prayed that the bullet would go true. But I knelt down to steady my aim,” said Helen, chuckling again. “And I broke the back of one of them wolves with myfirst shot. That was wonderful luck—with a twenty-two rifle. The bullet’s only a tiny thing.
“But I bowled Mr. Wolf over, and then I ran after the other one and the blatting Bozie. Bozie dodged the wolf somehow and came circling back at me, his tail flirting in the air, coming in stiff-legged jumps as a calf does, and searching his soul for sounds to tell how scart he was!
“I’d pushed another cartridge into my gun. But when Bozie came he bowled me over—flat on my back. Then the wolf made a leap, and I saw his light-gray underbody right over my head as he flashed after poor Bozie.
“I jest let go with the gun! Crackey! I didn’t have time to shoulder it, and it kicked and hit me in the nose and made my nose bleed awful. I was ‘all in,’ too, and I thought the wolf was going to eat Bozie, and then mebbeme, and I set up to bawl so’t Big Hen heard me farther than he could have heard my little rifle.
“Big Hen was always expectin’ me to get inter some kind of trouble, and he come tearin’ along lookin’ for me. And there I was, rolling in the grass an’ bawling, the second wolf kicking his life out with the blood pumping from his chest, not three yards away from me, and Bozie streakin’ it acrost the hill, his tail so stiff with fright you could ha’ hung yer hat on it!”
“Isn’t that perfectly grand!” cried Miss Van Ramsden, seizing Helen by the shoulders when she had finished and kissing her on both cheeks. “And you only ten years old?”
“But, you see,” said Helen, more quietly, “we are brought up that way in Montana. We would die a thousand deaths if we were taught to be afraid of anything on four legs.”
“It must be an exceedingly crude country,” remarked Hortense, her nose tip-tilted.
“Shocking!” agreed Belle.
“I’d like to go there,” announced Flossie, suddenly. “I think it must be fine.”
“Quite right,” agreed Miss Van Ramsden.
The older Starkweather girls could not go against their most influential caller. They were only too glad to have the Van Ramsden girl come to see them. But while the group were discussing Helen’s story, the girl from Sunset Ranch stole away and went up to her room.
She had not meant to tell about her life in the West—not in just this way. She had tried to talk about as her cousins expected her to, when once she got into the story; but its effect upon the visitors had not been just what either the Starkweather girls, or Helen herself, had expected.
She saw that she was much out of the good graces of Belle and Hortense at dinner; theyhardly spoke to her. But Flossie seemed to delight in rubbing her sisters against the grain.
“Oh, Pa,” she cried, “when Helen goes home, let me go with her; will you? I’d just love to be on a ranch for a while—I know I should! And Idoneed a vacation.”
“Nonsense, Floss!” gasped Hortense.
“You are a perfectly vulgar little thing,” declared Belle. “I don’t know where you get such low tastes.”
Mr. Starkweather looked at his youngest daughter in amazement. “How very ridiculous,” he said. “Ahem! You do not know what you ask, Flossie.”
“Oh! I never can have anything I want,” whined Miss Flossie. “And it must be great fun out on that ranch. You ought to hear Helen tell about it, Pa.”
“Ahem! I have no interest in such things,” said her father, sternly. “Nor should you. No well conducted and well brought up girl would wish to live among such rude surroundings.”
“Very true, Pa,” sighed Hortense, shrugging her shoulders.
“You are a very common little thing, with very common tastes, Floss,” admonished her oldest sister.
Now, all this was whipping Helen over Flossie’sshoulders. The latter grinned wickedly; but Helen felt hurt. These people were determined to consider Sunset Ranch an utterly uncivilized place, and her associates there beneath contempt.
The following morning she set out to find the address upon the letter Mr. Starkweather had given to her. Whether she should present this letter to Mr. Grimes at once, Helen was not sure. It might be that she would wish to get acquainted with him before he knew her identity. Her expectations were very vague, at best; and yet she had hope.
She hoped that through this old-time partner of her father’s she might pick up some clue to the truth about the lost money. The firm of Grimes & Morrell had been on the point of paying several heavy bills and notes. The money for this purpose, as well as the working capital of the firm, had been in two banks. Either partner could draw checks against these accounts.
When the deposits in both banks had been withdrawn it had been done by checks for each complete balance being presented at the teller’s window of both banks. And the tellers were quite sure that the person presenting the checks was Prince Morrell.
In the rush of business, however, neither teller had been positive of this. Of course, it mighthave been the bookkeeper, or Mr. Grimes, who had got the money on the checks. However it might be, the money disappeared; there was none with which to pay the creditors or to continue the business of the firm.
Fenwick Grimes had been a sufferer; Willets Starkweather had been a sufferer. What Allen Chesterton, the bookkeeper, had been, it was hard to say. He had walked out of the office of the firm and had never come back. Likewise after a few days of worry and disturbance, Prince Morrell had done the same.
At least, the general public presumed that Mr. Morrell had run away without leaving any clue. It looked as though the senior partner and the bookkeeper were in league.
But public interest in the mystery had soon died out. Only the creditors remembered. After ten years they were pleasantly reminded of the wreck of the firm of Grimes & Morrell by the receipt of their lost money, with interest compounded to date. The lawyer that had come on from the West to make the settlement for Prince Morrell bound the creditors to secrecy. The bankruptcy court had long since absolved Fenwick Grimes from responsibility for the debts of the old firm. Neither he nor Mr. Starkweather had to know that the partner who ran away had legally cleared his name.
But there was something more. The suspicion against Prince Morrell had burdened the cattle king’s mind and heart when he died. And his little daughter felt it to be her sacred duty to try, at least, to uncover that old mystery and to prove to the world that her father had been guiltless.
Mr. Grimes lived in an old house in a rather shabby old street just off Washington Square. Helen asked Mr. Lawdor how to find the place, and she rode downtown upon a Fifth Avenue ’bus.
The house was a half-business, half-studio building; and Mr. Grimes’s name—graven on a small brass plate—was upon a door in the lower hall. In fact, Mr. Grimes, and his clerk, occupied this lower floor, the gentleman owning the building, which he was holding for a rise in real estate values in that neighborhood.
The clerk, a sharp-looking young man with a pen behind his ear, answered Helen’s somewhat timid knock. He looked her over severely before he even offered to admit her, asking:
“What’s your business, please?”
“I came to see Mr. Grimes, sir.”
“By appointment?”
“No-o, sir. But——”
“He is very busy. He seldom sees anybody save by appointment. Are—are you acquainted with him?”
“No, sir. But my business is important.”
“To you, perhaps,” said the clerk, with a sneering smile. “But if it isn’t important tohimI shall catch it for letting you in. What is it?”
“It is business that I can tell to nobody except Mr. Grimes. Not in detail. But I can say this much: It concerns a time when Mr. Grimes was in business with another man—sixteen years or more ago and I have come—come from his old partner.”
“Humph!” said the clerk. “A begging interview? For, if so, take my advice—don’t try it. It would be no use. Mr. Grimes never gives anything away. He wouldn’t even bait a rat-trap with cheese-parings.”
“I have not come here to beg money of Mr. Grimes,” said Helen, drawing herself up.
“Well, you can come in and wait. Perhaps he’ll see you.”
This had all been said very low in the public hall, the clerk holding the door jealously shut behind him. Now he opened it slowly and let her enter a large room, with old and dusty furniture set about it, and the clerk’s own desk far back, by another door—which latter he guarded against all intrusion. Behind that door, of course, was the man she had come to see.
But as Helen turned to take a seat on the couch which the clerk indicated with a gesture of his pen,she suddenly discovered that she was not the only person waiting in the room. In a decrepit armchair by one of the front windows, and reading the morning paper, with his wig pushed back upon his bald brow, was the queer old gentleman with whom she had ridden across the continent when she had come to New York.
The discovery of this acquaintance here in Mr. Grimes’s office gave Helen a distinct shock.
CHAPTER XVIIIPROBING FOR FACTS
Helen sat down quickly and stared across the room at the queer old man. The latter at first seemed to pay her no attention. But finally she saw that he was skillfully “taking stock” of her from behind the shelter of the printed sheet.
The Western girl was more direct than that. She got up and walked across to him. The clerk uttered a very loud “Ahem!” as though to warn her to drop her intention; but Helen said coolly:
“Don’t you remember me, sir?”
“Ha! I believe itisthe little girl who came from the coast with me last week,” said the man.
“Not from the coast; from Montana,” corrected Helen.
“But you are dressed differently now and I was not sure,” he said. “How have you been?”
“Very well, I thank you. And you, sir?”
“Well. Very. But I did not expect to see you again—er—here.”
“No, sir. And you are waiting to see Mr. Grimes, too?”
“Er—something like that,” admitted the old man.
Helen eyed him thoughtfully. She had already glanced covertly once or twice at the clerk across the room. She was quite bright enough to see between the rungs of a ladder.
“Youare Mr. Grimes,” she said, bluntly, looking again at the old man, who was adjusting his wig.
He looked up at her slily, his avaricious little eyes twinkling as they had aboard the train when he had looked over her shoulder and caught her counting her money.
“You’re a very smart little girl,” he said, with a short laugh. “What have you come to see me about? Do you think of investing some of your money in mining stocks?”
“No,” said Helen. “I have no money to invest.”
“Humph. Did you find your folks?” he asked, turning the subject quickly.
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s the matter with you, then? What do you want?”
“YouareMr. Grimes?” she pursued, to make sure.
“Well, I don’t deny it.”
“I have come to talk to you about—aboutPrince Morrell,” she said, in a very low voice so that the clerk could not hear.
“Who?” gasped the man, falling back in his chair. Evidently Helen had startled him.
“Prince Morrell,” she replied.
“What are you to Prince Morrell?” demanded the man.
“I am his daughter. He is dead. I have come here to talk with you about the time—the time he left New York,” said the girl from Sunset Ranch, hesitatingly.
Mr. Grimes stared at her, with his wig still awry, for some moments; then the color began to come back into his face. Helen had not realized before that he had turned pale.
“You come into my office,” he snapped, jumping up briskly. “I’ll get to the bottom of this!”
His movements were so very abrupt and he looked at her so strangely that, to tell the truth, the girl from Sunset Ranch was a bit frightened. She trailed along behind him, however, with only a hesitating step, passing the wondering clerk, and heard the lock of the door of the inner office snap behind her as Mr. Grimes shut it.
He drew heavy curtains over the door, too. The place was a gloomy apartment until he turned on the electric light over a desk table. She sawthat there were curtains at all the windows, and at the other door, too.
“Come here,” he said, beckoning her to the desk, and to a chair that stood by it, and still speaking softly. “We will not be overheard here. Now! Tell me what you mean by coming to me in this way?”
He shot such an ugly look at her that Helen was again startled.
“What doyoumean?” 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. “Sohesent 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 didtheyreceive 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. “HowdidPrince 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 dothat?” 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 havealwaysbelieved 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 himlookguilty. 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 thefacts 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 aboutthat? 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 neverwasguilty.”
“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 youbelieveAllen 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 andUncle 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—sohesaid—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 notmyfather 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. “ButI 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 ofJonesthere 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. Itdidseem 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 madein 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 tenementwas ahome, 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 manwhom 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 havetwodollars 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 yerhonestgoin’ 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 youreighty, 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 adear!” 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.