“Patricia Beatty scores again with another plucky heroine who gets herself into, and out of, some offbeat scrapes. Hallie Lee Baker, the orphan of the title, is more tough than ornery, and she can tell a bigger whopper than most any cow-puncher in 1889 Texas. When her grandpa dies, Hallie winds up in the country orphanage, run by the steely Miz C.T. Hopkins, where lonely kids wait to be taken home by “pickers.” Hallie barely has time to befriend some of the lonelier orphans when a whopper about bad outlaw blood lands her in the house of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He baptizes her in an ice-cold river and makes her slave over the laundry and cooking; she doses his snuff with chili pepper in revenge. Next picker is Doc Wiley, who puts Hallie to work minding babies in his clinic until she mixes up a pack of dark-haired cousins. Third is a shameless actress who smokes a cheroot and rides a horse across the stage wearing next to nothing, shocking Hallie—who cusses like a bandit but knows where to draw the line. When all’s said and done, Hallie finds herself a home in the place she least expected it (with German-speaking sodbusters) and finds a friend in old C.T. A peppery treatment of historical curiosa—for assured reader appeal.”