Summary
No. 17—an iron-branded orphan, property in petticoats—sleeps on straw in a penitentiary attic while Manhattan titans tally her bones like doubloons. The child, christened Gladys Claypool by no one who loves her, is the living deed to a subterranean vault of ore, railroad spurs, and riverfront acres; her pulse ticks louder than any stock-ticker. Avaricious syndicates dispatch a mercenary nurse, silk-clad and serpent-smiled, to unshackle the girl for a surgeon’s fee; the superintendent, a carnivore in celluloid collar, demands his percentage of flesh. Cue midnight flits, chloroform whispers, and the hiss of train wheels as the nurse spirits the waif toward freedom, only to be intercepted by the turnkey who smells ransom on every hemline. Through snow-blasted switchyards and candleless barges, Gladys bleeds, starves, believes herself abandoned until a prairie-eyed drifter—part hobo, part Hesperides—offers half his last biscuit and the entire horizon. Together they bolt westward, pursued by locomotive sabotage, trestle dynamite, and the slow realization that her pedigree is carved into a tombstone in a ghost-town cemetery. Grandfather, thought dead, is only dormant; proof of lineage lies beneath the splintered floorboards of a one-room church where silence sings louder than choirboys. When the final ledger page is turned, the girl stands not as chattel but as cartographer of her own topography, her shadow longer than the claims once etched upon her skin.
Synopsis
"No. 17" is the only name of Gladys Claypool, an orphan in the unhappy charge, with others, of a brutal superintendent. However, he freedom is sought by financiers eager for the possession of some valuables to which she is entitled. A nurse agrees to help them in exchange for a sum of money, and the superintendent intervenes, hoping for a cut of the nurse's profit. The girl suffers greatly, and her life is threatened; but she meets a young man who helps her. He goes West, and the plotters try to remove him in a train wreck, but he survives to find the girl's grandfather and proof of her clear title to the disputed property.
