Betty was an orphan, and this Uncle Dick was her only living
relative. He came to her in Pineville after her mother's death and
when the friends with whom she had been staying decided to go to
California. He remembered Mrs. Peabody, an old school friend, and
suggested that Betty might enjoy a summer spent on a farm. These
events are related in the first book of this series, called "Betty
Gordon at Bramble Farm."

That story tells how Betty came to the farm to find Joseph Peabody a
domineering, pitiless miser, his wife Agatha, a drab woman crushed in
spirit, and Bob Henderson, the "poorhouse rat," a bright intelligent
lad whom the Peabodys had taken from the local almshouse for his
board and clothes. Betty Gordon found life at Bramble Farm very
different from the picture she and her uncle had drawn in
imagination, and only the fact that her uncle's absence in the oil
fields had prevented easy communication with him had held her through
the summer.

Once, indeed, she had run away, but circumstances had brought her
and Bob to the pleasant home of the town police recorder, and Mr. and
Mrs. Bender had proved themselves true and steadfast friends to the
boy and girl who stood sorely in need of friendship. It was the
Benders who had exacted a promise from both Bob and Betty that they
would not run away from Bramble Farm without letting them know.

Betty had been instrumental in causing the arrest of two men who had
stolen chickens from the Peabody farm, and at the hearing before the
recorder something of Mr. Peabody's characteristics and of the
conditions at Bramble Farm had been revealed.