gone abroad among the under servants that this was a
poor relation. No tips need be expected. The girl flirted her cloth and
turned her back upon Helen as the latter started through the ghost walk
and up the other stairway.

She easily found the room. It was quite as good as her own room at the
ranch, as far as size and furniture went. Helen would have been amply
satisfied with it had the room been given to her in a different spirit.

But now she closed her door, locked it carefully, hung her jacket over the
knob that she should be sure she was not spied upon, and sat down beside
the bed.

She was not a girl who cried often. She had wept sincere tears the evening
before when she learned that Aunt Eunice was dead. But she could not weep
now.

Her emotion was emphatically wrathful. Without cause--that she could
see--these city relatives had maligned her--had maligned her father's
memory--and had cruelly shown her, a stranger, how they thoroughly hated
her presence.

She had come away from Sunset Ranch with two well-devised ideas in her
mind. First of all, she hoped to clear her father's name of that old
smirch upon it. Secondly, he had wished her to live with her relatives if
possible, that she might become used to the refinements and circumstances
of a more civilized life.

Refinements! Why, these cousins of hers hadn't the decencies of red
Indians!

On impulse Helen had taken the tone she had with them--had showed them in
"that cowgirl" just what they had expected to find. She would be bluff and
rude and ungrammatical and ill-bred. Perhaps the spirit in which Helen did
this was not to be commended; but she had begun it on the impulse of the
moment and she felt she must keep it up during her stay in the
Starkweather house.

How long that would be Helen was not prepared to say now. It was in her
heart one moment not to unpack her trunk at all. She could go to a
hotel--the best in New York, if she so desired. How amazed her cousins
would be if they knew that she was at this moment carrying more than eight
hundred dollars in cash on her person? And suppose they learned that she
owned thousands upon thousands of acres of grazing land in her own right,
on which roamed unnumbered cattle and horses?

Suppose they found out that she had been schooled in a first-class
institution in Denver--probably as well schooled as they themselves? What
would they say? How would they feel should they suddenly make these
discoverie