“I’m a perfect sight!” she called to Bob dolorously.  “I don’t believe I can ever get the oil spots out of this silk.”

“Sue the company!” Bob cried, with a grin.  “Don’t let Clover go to sleep till we’re nearer home, Betty.”

The girl urged the little bay forward with a whispered word of encouragement, and gradually, very gradually, they began to draw out of the rain of oil.

Betty Gordon was not an Oklahoma girl, though she rode with the effortless ease of a Westerner.  She was an orphan, of New England stock, and had come from the East to the oil fields to join her one living relative, a beloved uncle whose interest in oil holdings made an incessant traveler of him.

This Richard Gordon, “Uncle Dick” to Bob Henderson as well as to Betty, had found himself unexpectedly made guardian of his little niece at a time when it was impassible for him to establish a home for her.  His time and skill pledged to the oil company he represented, Mr. Gordon had solved the problem of what to do with Betty by sending her to spend the summer with an old childhood friend of his, a Mrs. Peabody who had married a farmer, reputed well-to-do.  Betty’s experiences, pleasant and otherwise, as a member of the Peabody household, have been told in the first book of this series entitled “Betty Gordon at Bramble Farm; or The Mystery of a Nobody.”

She made some true friends during the months she spent with the Peabodys, and perhaps the closest, and certainly the most loyal, was Bob Henderson.  A year older than Betty, the fourteen year old Bob, whose life at Bramble Farm had been harsh and unlovely and preceded by nothing brighter than a drab existence at the county poor farm, became the champion of the dark-eyed girl who had smiled at him and suggested that because they were both orphans they had a common bond of friendship.

How Bob Henderson got track of his mother’s people and what steps were necessary before he could discover a definite clue, have been related in the second volume of the series, entitled, “Betty Gordon in Washington; or Strange Adventures in a Great City.”

In this book Bob and Betty came together again in the Capitol City, and Betty acquired a second “Uncle Dick” in the person of Richard Littell, the father of three lively daughters who innocently kidnapped Betty, only to have the entire family become her firm friends.  While in Washington Bob and Betty each received good news that sent them trustfully to Oklahoma, there to meet Uncle Dick Gordon, and later, Bob’s own aunts.

The story of the “Saunders’ place” and of the unscrupulous sharpers who tried to cheat the old ladies who were the sisters of Bob’s dead mother, has been told in the third book about Betty Gordon.  This book, “Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil; or The Farm that Was Worth a Fortune,” relates the varied experiences of Bob and Betty in the oil section of Oklahoma and the long train of events that culminated in the sale of the Saunders farm for ninety thousand dollars.  Uncle Dick had been made guardian of Bob, at his own and the aunts’ request, so Bob was now a ward with Betty.