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

“But I love Sunset Ranch!” cried Helen again.

“Aye. But I watched your mother. I know how much she missed the gentler things she had been brought up to. Had I been able to pay off those old creditors while she was alive, she might have gone back.

“And yet,” the ranchman sighed, “the stigma is there. The blot is still on your father’s name, Snuggy. People in New York still believe that I was dishonest. They believe that with the proceeds of my dishonesty I came out here and went into the cattle business.

“You see, my dear? Even the settling with our old creditors – the creditors of Grimes & Morrell – made suspicion wag her tongue more eagerly than ever. I paid every cent, with interest compounded to the date of settlement. Grimes had long since had himself cleared of his debts and started over again. I do not know even that he and Starkweather know that I have been able to clear up the whole matter.

“However, as I say, the stain upon my reputation remains. I could never explain my flight. I could never imagine what became of the money. Somebody embezzled it, and I was the one who ran away. Do you see, my dear?”

And Helen told him that she did see, and assured him again and again of her entire trust in his honor. But Mr. Morrell died with the worry of the old trouble – the trouble that had driven him across the continent – heavy upon his mind.

And now it was serving to make Helen’s mind most uneasy. The crime of which her father had been accused was continually in her thoughts.

Who had really been guilty of the embezzlement? The bookkeeper, who disappeared? Fenwick Grimes, the partner? Or, Who?

As the Rose pony – her own favorite mount – took Helen Morrell up the bluff path to the View on this evening, the remembrance of this long talk with her father before he died was running in the girl’s mind.

Perhaps she was a girl who would naturally be more seriously impressed than most, at sixteen. She had been brought up among older people. She was a wise little thing when she was a mere toddler.

And after her mother’s death she had been her father’s daily companion until she was old enough to be sent away to be educated. The four long terms at the Denver school had carried Helen Morrell (for she had a quick mind) through those grades which usually prepare girls for college.

When she came back after graduation, however, she saw that her father needed her companionship more than she needed college. And, again, she was too domestic by nature to really long for a higher education.

She was glad now – oh! so glad – that she had remained at Sunset Ranch during these last few months. Her father had died with her arms about him. As far as he could be comforted, Helen had comforted him.

But now, as she rode up the rocky trail, she murmured to herself:

“If I could only clear dad’s name!”

Again she raised her eyes and saw a buckskin pony and its rider getting nearer and nearer to the summit.

“Get on, Rose!” she exclaimed. “That chap will beat us out. Who under the sun can he be?”

She was sure the rider of the buckskin was no Sunset puncher. Yet he seemed garbed in the usual chaps, sombrero, flannel shirt and gay neckerchief of the cowpuncher.

“And there isn’t another band of cattle nearer than Froghole,” thought the girl, adjusting her body to the Rose pony’s quickened gait.

She did not know it, but she was quite as much an object of interest to the strange rider as he was to her. And it was worth while watching Helen Morrell ride a pony.

The deep brown of her cheek was relieved by a glow of healthful red. Her thick plaits of hair were really sunburned; her thick eyebrows were startlingly light compared with her complexion.

Her eyes were dark gray, with little golden lights playing in them; they seemed fairly to twinkle when she laughed. Her lips were as red as ripe sumac berries; her nose, straight, long, and generously moulded, was really her handsomest feature, for of course her hair covered her dainty ears more or less.

From the rolling collar of her blouse her neck rose firm and solid – as strong-looking as a boy’s. She was plump of body, with good shoulders, a well-developed arm, and her ornamented russet riding boots, with a tiny silver spur in each heel, covered very pretty and very small feet.

Her hand, if plump, was small, too; but the gauntlets she wore made it seem larger and more mannish than it was. She rode as though she were a part of the pony.

She had urged on the strawberry roan and now came out upon the open plateau at the top of the bluff just as the buckskin mounted to the same level from the other side.

The rock called “the View” was nearer to the stranger than to herself. It overhung the very steepest drop of the eminence.

Helen touched Rose with the spur, and the pony whisked her tail and shot across the uneven sward toward the big boulder where Helen and her father had so often stood to survey the rolling acres of Sunset Ranch.

Whether the stranger on the buckskin thought her mount had bolted with her, Helen did not know. But she heard him cry out, saw him swing his hat, and the buckskin started on a hard gallop along the verge of the precipice toward the very goal for which the Rose pony was headed.

“The foolish fellow! He’ll be killed!” gasped Helen, in sudden fright. “That soil there crumbles like cheese! There! He’s down!”

She saw the buckskin’s forefoot sink. The brute stumbled and rolled over – fortunately for the pony away from the cliff’s edge.

But the buckskin’s rider was hurled into the air. He sprawled forward like a frog diving and – without touching the ground – passed over the brink of the precipice and disappeared from Helen’s startled gaze.

CHAPTER II

DUDLEY STONE

The victim of the accident made no sound. No scream rose from the depths after he disappeared. The buckskin pony rolled over, scrambled to its feet, and cantered off across the plateau.

Helen Morrell had swerved her own mount farther to the south and came to the edge of the caved-in bit of bank with a rush of hoofs that ended in a wild scramble as she bore down upon the Rose pony’s bit.

She was out of her saddle, and had flung the reins over Rose’s head, on the instant. The well-trained pony stood like a rock.

The girl, her heart beating tumultuously, crept on hands and knees to the crumbling edge of the bluff.

She knew its scarred face well. There were outcropping boulders, gravel pits, ledges of shale, brush clumps and a few ragged trees clinging tenaciously to the water-worn gullies.

She expected to see the man crushed and bleeding on some rock below. Perhaps he had rolled clear to the bottom.

But as her swift gaze searched the face of the bluff, there was no rock, splotched with red, in her line of vision. Then she saw something in the top of one of the trees, far down.

It was the yellow handkerchief which the stranger had worn. It fluttered in the evening breeze like a flag of distress.

“E-e-e-yow!” cried Helen, making a horn of her hands as she leaned over the edge of the precipice, and uttering the puncher’s signal call.

“E-e-e-yow!” came up a faint reply.

She saw the green top of the tree stir. Then a face – scratched and streaked with blood – appeared.

“For the love of heaven!” called a thin voice. “Get somebody with a rope. I’ve got to have some help.”

“I have a rope right here. Pass it under your arms, and I’ll swing you out of that tree-top,” replied Helen, promptly.

She jumped up and went to the pony. Her rope – she would no more think of traveling without it than would one of the Sunset punchers – was coiled at the saddlebow.

Running back to the verge of the bluff she planted her feet on a firm boulder and dropped the coil into the depths. In a moment it was in the hands of the man below.

“Over your head and shoulders!” she cried.

“You can never hold me!” he called back, faintly.