oks rounded up. They're the ones that hurt the
name of reputable oil stocks. You don't care if I go, do you?"

"I did want you to help me scatter seeds," confessed Betty candidly.
"However, go ahead, and I'll do it myself. Lend me the camera, and
I'll take my sweater and stay out a while. If I'm not here when you
come back, look for me out on the observation platform."

Bob hurried after the two possible sharpers, and Betty went through
the train till she came to the last platform, railed in and offering
the comforts of a porch to those passengers who did not mind the
breeze. This morning it was deserted, and Betty was glad, for she
wanted a little time to herself.

CHAPTER II

THINKING BACKWARD

Betty leaned over the rail, flinging the contents of the seed packets
into the air and breathing a little prayer that the wind might carry
them far and that none might "fall on stony ground."

"If I never see the flowers, some one else may," she thought. "I
remember that old lady who lived in Pineville, poor blind Mrs.
Tompkins. She was always telling about the pear orchard she and her
husband planted the first year of their married life out in Ohio.
Then they moved East, and she never saw the trees. 'But somebody has
been eating the pears these twenty years,' she used to say. I hope my
flowers grow for some one to see."

When she had tossed all the seeds away, Betty snuggled into one of
the comfortable reed chairs and gave herself up to her own thoughts.
Since leaving Washington, the novelty and excitement of the trip had
thoroughly occupied her mind, and there had been little time for
retrospection.

This bright morning, as the prairie land slipped past the train,
Betty Gordon's mind swiftly reviewed the incidents of the last few
months and marveled at the changes brought about in a comparatively
short time. She was an orphan, this dark-eyed girl of thirteen, and,
having lost her mother two years after her father's death, had turned
to her only remaining relative, an uncle, Richard Gordon. How he came
to her in the little town of Pineville, her mother's girlhood home,
and arranged to send her to spend the summer on a farm with an old
school friend of his has been told in the first volume of this
series, entitled "Betty Gordon at Bramble Farm; or, The Mystery of a
Nobody." At Bramble Farm Betty had met Bob Henderson, a lad a year or
so older than herself and a ward from the county poorhouse. The girl
and boy