“I will. Will you be kind enough to stay with Tommy a few minutes?”
“Certainly.”
Nellie Ardell went off at once, and was back in ten minutes. When she returned she had rented three small rooms for less money than she now paid.
She had not many articles of furniture and it did not seem the least bit like working to our hero to assist her in transferring them across the way. The two worked together, and as they labored they talked, Jerry telling her a good deal about his mission to New York and the girl relating her own experiences in keeping the wolf from the door.
“We were not always poor,” said Nellie Ardell. “When father was alive we lived in our own home in Brooklyn. But he grew interested in a Western land scheme and it took all of his money.”
“That was our trouble. I came to New York to see what I could do toward making Alexander Slocum give an accounting of the money he put in a California land scheme for my uncle.”
“Why, my father was in Slocum’s land scheme!” she ejaculated.
“Perhaps it was the same. This land scheme I speak of was called the Judge Martin—why, I don’t know.”
“It is the same. It was so called because the land once belonged to a Judge Martin of Colorado.”
Of course, Jerry was deeply interested, and, the moving finished, he and she sat down to talk the matter over.